MY FATHER BROUGHT ME to a therapist when I was eight years old and told her that he was worried about me. After our hour-long session together, she pulled him into her office and said to him, “You don’t have to worry, this is quite common for children his age.” I can no longer recall her name, but I remember the way she wrote in her notebook every time I spoke, as if what I had to say was important, was worth writing down. It was something I had never experienced, and I enjoyed the act of speaking freely, my words pouring out with the excitement and trepidation of a bird embarking on its first flight, and when I returned home, I felt empowered to continue telling my stories with a vivaciousness that perturbed my father.

His discomfort manifested into arguments with my mother, which often took place in the kitchen after they tucked me into bed, their tense voices carrying through the thin walls of our cramped two-bedroom apartment.

“He can’t keep making up these stories about other people,” he had said to her one night. “He waved to a random man at the park and told me that they used to be brothers in another life.”

“Remember what the therapist told you. Maybe we should consider that he’s telling the truth.”

“Don’t tell me you still believe in that stuff.”

After some silence, my father continued, “I’m just worried that the other kids at school will think he’s peculiar. We both know how he sticks out there.”

I waited for my mother’s response, but none came, and I knew their conversation was over.

The next morning, I woke to her sitting on the edge of my bed. When she noticed I was awake, she smiled, the curve of her lips making its way to her dimples and suddenly I was no longer lying on my bed, no longer in that dilapidated building, and instead, I was sitting in the middle of a grass field wet with morning dew. The air was crisp, free from the stench of exhaust and the malodorousness of the city, and my lungs savored every breath. Snow-capped mountains lined the horizon, looming over a great taiga of pine trees. The sun was rising, peeking behind the mountain range, backlighting it in a halo of orange gold.

The field I was lying upon was still dark, my side of the world in shadow, and it was for this reason I didn’t realize there was a woman standing next to me until she let out a deep exhale. She wore clothes I didn’t recognize and held what appeared to be some sort of spear, the sharp edge of a rock smoothed down to a fine point and tied to a wooden stick. She noticed my stare and returned my gaze with a smile, the rising sun illuminating the curve of her lips and dimples that resembled my mother’s. She uttered a phrase in a language I no longer understood, yet it triggered a feeling of recognition so powerful that I felt it pull me back to my apartment, back to my bedroom, back to a version of my mother who was now sitting beside me, her fingers gliding through my hair.

“Your father has spent too many years in this country with its false gods,” she said to me. “He doesn’t remember the inheritance we carry."

Contrary to what my father had told my mother and the therapist, I had never used the words another life. I had merely described to him the innate sense of knowing I had felt when the old man passed by us at the park, his slow and measured gait triggering a series of vignettes that filled my mind. They were disjointed, seemingly out of order, flashes of different seasons and celebrations I couldn’t identify. But in these images, there was one consonant. At times, he is a boy running alongside me, our feet leaving behind imprints on the muddied road, the pitter-patter of gentle rain all around us. At times he is a man, a father, with thick black hair, a booming voice, and hands as coarse as sandpaper. At times his hair is thin and gray, his back is slouched, and we are walking alongside a river, our steps slow and measured. In these vignettes is an entire life and when he is lying in bed, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he takes my hand one last time and whispers words I don’t understand but feel—my brother.

Chiyeung Lau  is a Fuzhounese writer who lives in Philadelphia with his spouse and three cats. He is a Roots Wounds Words fellow and an alumnus of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His short fiction has appeared in Ghost Parachute, Flash Frog, and elsewhere.