I can’t sing. In my family, that means everything.

You see, we come from a long line of ancient magic: as deep as the ocean, as old as the mountains, as wild as a storm in midwinter, as strange and inevitable as the forces of the earth itself. It runs in our blood, in our flesh and bone, in our hair and fingers and heart and teeth; it is as much a part of us as our brown skin and dark eyes, and, of course, our voices. For this is how our magic is born: of the songs we sing.

Ever since I was a little baby, my father and mother and aunts and uncles (and many sisters and brothers and cousins and other questionable relations besides…) have tried to teach me - every scrap of lyric they know, from the mightiest rain summons to cradle minders and cattle catchers and fertile boons for the rice paddies. I can hear just fine, no question; I learned each and every word I was taught. And I learned their voices, rich and old and thin and sweet, low, high, loud, soft. I know everything there is to know about singing in my village, which, in my village, is quite a lot.

But when it comes to singing my family’s songs myself, it sounds like this.

All right, I forgot you can’t hear things through a book. Let me describe instead.

It sounds like a bullfrog had sex with a wetted kitchen pan while sitting on a broken lyre, while twelve hungry cats yowl desperately for the bullfrog to get off, because they’re stuck under the lyre, and are in turn on top of a set of tiny wailing goblins, and the lyre has got tuberculosis, which I’m not supposed to know about, because it hasn’t been discovered yet.

That’s not a very helpful analogy. But the point is, I can’t sing.

It gets frustrating, you know? Everyone here treats me as if I’ve lost a leg or something. But that’s not true; I can run just fine, faster than Old Brother’s dogs if they decide to chase me (especially when I steal the pork buns that he makes for them as treats). I can do everything just fine, actually. I just can’t do what they want me to do, with my voice, and with our magic.

So my day goes like this. I wake up, and fold my bedroll under the shelf of the goddess of the night (who is also the goddess of fertility, and sex, and a few other things; that’s usually how these things go), and I go to the kitchen to help make rice balls for breakfast with my mother. I listen to her hum the water in the pot hung over the fire into boiling. I clean the rice in a pan and pour it into the water. I burn myself on the steam. My mother gives me a pitying look and takes my hand.

“Let me make it better,” she says.

At this point, I know I ought to let her. Still, I yank my fingers out of her grip. “It’s fine,” I say. It is not fine. My skin is already red and stinging.

“Sunila,” says my mother, and gives me The Look. She doesn’t have to sing a song of cold or fear for me to understand what this means. “Give me your hand.”

So I do, and look away while she forms her mouth around the sweet, lovely notes of a plea to the resplendent goddess Lai to soothe my flesh and make me whole again. It’s just a small burn; it hardly matters. Besides, I’m seventeen. Old enough to take care of myself.

I stand still and do not squirm when I feel the itch of new skin turning over beneath the old.

By the time she’s done with that my brothers are awake. They come skipping into the kitchen, both of them chanting in laughing voices a song of light feet and quick hands, and I have to lunge to catch them both before they reach the jam buns that my aunt made for us the night before, stowed high on a shelf, where they won’t be able to reach - at least not before they learn the songs for truly light feet, the kind that will let you go a little higher and stay a little longer in the air before coming back down. Or when they learn to use a stool to stand on, the way I do. Nothing wrong with that.

I love my brothers, I really do. They’re a handful, and a pair of little monkeys, but as jealous as I am of their sweet, shining faces - the ones that seem to attract love from every single person in my family - and, of course, their perfect, clear songs, they are still my brothers. When my mother’s back is turned, I give them each a jam bun with a smile. My mother is silent, and I know she can’t see behind her without singing a ward - as much as I think, sometimes, that she might have eyes in the back of her head.

“Don’t tell her,” I mouth, putting a finger over my lips.

They nod and giggle. Even their laughter sounds musical.

Auntie comes in from the loft above. Her voice is still thick and cobwebbed with sleep, but she bends down and murmurs a song of blessings for my brothers, her two favorite nephews. They laugh harder when she pinches their cheeks. One of my brothers opens his hand and shows her the latest rock he’s found in the river behind our fields.

“That’s a good one,” says Auntie, pretending to examine the stone with great interest, turning it in her fingers this way and that. “Would you like me to clean it for you?”

I am used to the singing, of course. But I still can’t help but listen - and watch, with one ear - when she tilts her head to the stone and begins, softly, to sing a song of cleansing. Auntie has always been the best singer in the family. Her voice is beautiful. Her magic is powerful. No one is better than she is. It shows.

Even I, with my ailing bullfrog voice, cannot help but feel a little bit of stirring in my chest, in sympathy with the sheer beauty of her song, when I hear her. It fills the air of our tiny house with shimmering, achingly lovely notes, the highest ones nearly keening, the lowest almost a lullaby. A cleansing spell is hard to get right, even for something as small and simple as this stone.

My aunt’s voice soars and swoops easily through the verses, though. And by now I am sure even my own mother is watching.

Breathless, I watch as the pebble in my brothers’ hands ripples, turns, stretches into something not-quite-pebble-shaped, and then, at last, settles back, cool and gleaming, free, suddenly, of all the layers of dirt and dust and river mud that had clung to it. It’s nearly unrecognizable. When my brothers brought it to my aunt, it had been a lump of gray and brown. Now it catches the light and sparkles in a hundred different shades of alabaster white, blood orange, rust and gold, even palest, wintry blue.

My aunt opens her eyes - everyone closes them when they really get into singing for some reason - and smiles at the boys. “Do you think it’s clean enough?” she asks them.

They shake their heads. The gleam in their eyes matches the gleam of the stone. They’re as dazzled as I am. “Sing it again,” they squeal. “Sing it again, Auntie.”

She laughs and shakes her head. Rising to her feet, she says, “There is only so much water in a river,” and turns to ask me for a rice ball. Her eyes widen. My mother screams.

“Sunila!” she cries out.

I turn to look at her dumbly. Then I realize that the plate of rice balls I’m supposed to be washing has tipped in my senseless hands. I hear the balls hit the floor.

I panic and dive after them. But I’ve gone down wrong, and in my panic, I reach out to grab the nearest thing - the pot full of cooking rice balls. My hand burns. I screech and draw back.

Too late, the pot of boiling water begins to tip, too.

My mother gasps. But the sound is quickly drowned out. For a single, split second, it seems like all the air in the house has been replaced with a single thin, pure note, not sung, not screamed. Then it drops, and the pot teeters on the edge, and then, slowly, ever so slowly, tips back into the right place, above the fire.

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I look at my aunt, whose mouth is still open, mid song. My hand feels like it is on fire. I turn and look groggily for the spilled rice balls, but my aunt is faster. She kneels quickly and picks them up. For half a second, I think she’s about to repeat the cleansing song. But instead, she gets up and walks over to me, and puts both of them in my hands. They are soggy and gritty with dust. My aunt’s face is like stone.

“Sorry,” I tell her.

She covers my hands with hers. I can hear her humming now, the same song my mother sang earlier, but under her breath. The pain in my hands subsides. I can feel the heat withdraw from my skin.

I know better than to thank her. Her expression has not changed. She removes her hands from mine and turns away. She says nothing.

My mother, however, is not so bound to silence. She gestures at the pot of rice balls. Her face is tired. “They’re ready,” she says. “Give them to your brothers.”

So I do.

I know I could be nice, now, and be grateful to my aunt for healing me, and for not chiding me aloud about having burned myself, or having spilled the rice balls, or nearly having tipped the whole pot over onto the ground. I know they are being kind to me - the weird one, the cripple - in fixing my messes and singing me better when I can’t sing myself. I know this is how it must be done, or I would’ve burned or tripped or drowned myself by clumsiness into an early death, long ago.

But some small part of me, every day that I wake up and hurt myself on steam and trudge out the stool to reach high things and walk every inch of the fields by foot instead of by skimming over the water with my damn singing magic, thinks: why not let me burn? Why treat me like such a cripple if it’s so terrible a burden for the rest of you to bear? Why pity me if you’re just going to make me feel like shit?

All right, yes, I know; that’s probably the same angsty teenage drama every family has heard too many times to count. But here’s the thing.

During the night, when my mother and auntie are asleep, I used to steal away to Long Mountain, where we keep all our dead ancestors, and visit my father’s tomb, and offer him some of last night’s food, and maybe pray a bit, if I felt in a godly mood. I knew that in the peeling, lacquered box on top of the mound where his ashes were buried was a few things he’d had before he died, and I also knew I was not, under any circumstances, to open the box and look at them. So, of course, one night, I opened the box and looked at what was inside.

My father, supposedly, was a restless soul. He was meant to become a water buffalo herder like his father, and his father’s father before that. But the moment he turned eighteen and gave blood to the bull gods, he left the village on a boat on the river, a passing barge, my mother says. She was terribly in love with him, and it hurt her to let him go, and to have to wait for him to come back.

And he did come back, and with him he brought strange things from far away: books, which we knew of but did not have, spices, cloth to make beautiful robes and dresses with, and many other things besides. My aunt told me when I was little what a book was like, but I didn’t really know what one was until I unearthed my father’s box from beneath the little pile of half-burned incense sticks and the ashes of old offerings, and saw the book he’d brought home for myself.

The book was a stack of many pieces of paper - the same thing we made offerings to the gods with - with writing on them, also like our paper offerings, but a lot of writing, and a lot of paper, all wrapped up in a leather binding. It had words in a language I didn’t know, but there were also pictures, some of which I recognized - water buffalo, mountains, water birds and eagles, and other creatures I didn’t recognize, and more complicated things I couldn’t name, too. I used the pictures to learn a little, and, slowly, taught myself to read.

I learned that this book came from people who didn’t have our magic. Nowhere did they mention singing things into being, or chanting blessings to make the rice come out early, or summoning the rain in dry times. I slowly, slowly came to understand that they were like me. No magic, no help.

And they thrived! They made this book, after all. They must have traveled long distances to find all the things they’d compiled in the book, because I saw many different places described, some near enough to our village that I vaguely knew of them, others completely unknown. They must have been like my father, who claimed to have seen wondrous things in lands many moons’ travel away from us - places where there was no water or grass, places that were flat, places where the river opened up into a sea and the water went on and on forever.

I had never been to any of these places. But I lived there through my father’s book, and I came to understand that singing magic was not everything, and maybe out there, I wouldn’t have been a broken girl at all; I would have been normal.

My aunt doesn’t know that I read my father’s book. Neither does my mother. If they did, I’m sure they would be very angry with me. They don’t like my father, after all. After he came back the first time, he married my mother and gave her twins - my older sisters, who are both married themselves now, and live in houses of their own, with Loud Bao and Sanut, their husbands. Then, after my father got my mother pregnant, he left again, even though my mother wanted him to stay. She was more heartbroken than ever.

It took seven more years for him to return, and by that time he’d missed his daughters growing up. My mother was livid, but she gave him another child anyway - me. My auntie thinks their anger at each other was the beginning of the end, though. My mother’s pain probably leaked through, into her womb, and caused me not to be right, and it ended up killing my father, too, the day he decided to leave for the last time.

There was supposed to be a storm summoning that day, to bring rain to the crops - nothing too big, just enough to coax the earth into growing green things again. My aunt, with her lovely, strong voice, was meant to do it. But at the last moment she fell ill. When she opened her mouth, all that came out was a dry coughing whisper.

That’s what she says, anyway. So my mother volunteered to do the summoning instead.

But there’s a problem. When you sing, it’s your heart that comes through in your voice. Everyone knows that; a happy singer sings happy songs, an angry singer - well, you get the point. That day, my mother was full of rage. That day, my father told her he wouldn’t stay.

She promised my auntie she wouldn’t let my father’s betrayal mess up the summoning; she promised she wasn’t angry. But she lied, my auntie says. Who wouldn’t be furious? My mother had just given birth to me, after all. She couldn’t let my father go while she was nursing me.

But he was adamant. So, while my mother set off into the fields to sing rain down upon us, my father packed his things. He made it halfway to the river when the first crack of thunder shook the earth. The second brought him down.

This part I only know from my auntie. My mother refuses to talk about it, and I’ve never asked. When I was little, my auntie said my mother didn’t remember it, that the magic had gotten inside her once she’d found out how my father had died, and in her grief, she’d sung herself into forgetting. Now, I am not so sure that’s true, but I know better than to ask. Some things are better left alone.

Anyway, memories of my father bring only anger and pain in my family, so I know I can’t possibly let my auntie and my mother know that I visit his tomb regularly, that I’ve read his book, that I still read it. To me, it feels like the best way I have to feel closer to a man I don’t really know. To them, I’m sure it would be an insult.

(I keep the book in my bedroll these days. Trying to make sure I don’t disturb the lacquered box too much each and every night would be too much of a pain in the ass.)

So when I am particularly irked at my family and their stupid magical singing that I can’t do - as I am irked today, after what happened in the morning - I sullenly wade through the paddies with the water buffalo, and imagine going out there, where there are people who don’t all sing to get things done. At the far end of the field, I even hum a little tune, a song for buffalo charming, to see if I can’t get the notes right and prove my family wrong anyway. My water buffalo doesn’t even turn. Damn.

I know my mother would hate it if I left; she needs me around the house, and certainly in the fields, as much as she doesn’t want to admit it, since my brothers, the product of a night of abandon with the village shaman seven years ago, are hardly strong enough to drag the plow through the mud yet. Only I, with my incredible seventeen-year-old girl’s arms, can do that. Oh the joy. (Sexism aside, I am pretty sinewy, if I do say so myself.)

I am useful. They just don’t like telling me I am. Because I’m not as useful as them, because I can’t sing.

You see my problem now?

It’s too bad boats don’t come here often. Not that there’s anything wrong with our river, exactly; it’s perfectly wide, and deep, and has a good strong current. But what would a boat come here for? The one my father took came out of the blue, says auntie, a barge chartered by some rich man who wanted to explore and catalogue the corners of the world. No such luck here. We’re self-sufficient - besides tons and tons of rice and other crops, we make our own clothes from the sheep and goats we raise, all organic, grass-fed, and free range - and also quite boring, if you don’t count the incessant magical singing. None of us particularly want to leave. Except for me. And that’s only because I can’t sing.

My water buffalo has stopped to take a shit. I lean awkwardly on the plow and stare up at the sky, as if my father is up there and can see me, and sigh.

“I wish someone would just come up this river and give me an excuse to get out of here,” I mutter at the clouds.

And then someone does.