Five-color barbets coo, regular as turn signals on oft-repaired scooters: shudder slow, idle like a congested machine, then find tread traction on warming asphalt swept distractedly by shopkeepers not yet ready for morning, perhaps hungover, flinch against empty clangs of someone's minor repairs a block away, or the clatter-screech of rusted chains raise a laundry bar—the bald laundress’s slippers scuff, syncopated against the shopkeep’s sweep, punctuated by the descending-third clink-clonk—a gate close, metal counterpart to a doorbell unrung. Clucks of another bird sloughed off like peels of potato skin—disapproval for the whine of amateur repairs advance to saw perhaps—some tool like tinnitus echo down the neighborhood's canal constant as traffic, rumble run here and away on Filial Piety East Road, for there's no light nearby to give pause, only staccato of horns or the crueler riff—rip of turbo engines waste on short sprints between the two-minute reds of Taipei. The only sound sharp enough to cut through muddle noise—the green flute birds, crisp tease, sways the Muse Garden bamboo.

huoh! slippers slip on soft leaves, flood step-smoothed wooden stairs. The fall knocks all breath from the child, which she reclaims as a challenge: jumps, both arms swinging, seams unstitching. She propels off-trail, away from her grandmother’s garden, to hunt steeper slopes, into the humid August forest.

See that generous old tree: low thick boughs, hanging ropes encircling its trunk too inviting not to climb. Her focus sings on footholds, ignoring fears of her increasing height over unkempt understory, a smatter of frantic patterned wild ginger, flying spider-monkey tree fern, plants not yet learned—the child has not noticed a small figure several trees up the slope, mirroring her movements.

o! that panicked moment, realizing the mistake of swinging like Tarzan from the banyan tree’s aerial roots. She sees red—flash between rushing trees. An invitation to play! The lonely genius half hides yet follows, breathing hard as the little boy in red seems to fly into the denser muggier dimmer woods. Thickets of bamboo knock and creak, though she feels no wind. Red swishes close. She reaches, smiles. She always charms, but bushy bangs shadow the little boy’s eyes in a face bluish impossible: cold in this heat with their chase, she still shivers, reaching for a banyan’s sturdy safety, scanning for the trail, the laid steps, and the handrail running beside. What catches her wrist is a looping root. It pulls so gently. She, so light, breathless. The arboreal necklace dizzily quick to enfold, laced in encircling roots.

You don’t know our stories yet, her grandmother’s voice whispers.