Rakpabon (รักษ์ป่าบอน)
Ashley Mangtani
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I do not know them, and they do not know me. The men in the brown trucks call me by a name a clerk typed onto a card.
Jeab Rakpabon (เจี๊ยบ รักษ์ป่าบอน) Printed on me like a warning.
I am the Protector of Pa Bon Forest.
My mother named me where she squatted in the roots of a Monkey Jack (มะหาด) tree that drank from the river below, hooked her fingers behind my crowning skull, and pulled me out of her body onto a bed of leaves.
The canopy ate my cry and sealed our bond. My mother bit through the cord with her teeth, and I have been on this earth (แผ่นดิน) ever since.
That is the only deed this land ever gave me.
Then they drew their lines.
The state gave the forest a new name:
─────────────── ❖ ───────────────
THALE BAN NATIONAL PARK (อุทยานแห่งชาติทะเลบัน)
─────────────── ❖ ───────────────
A Protected Area.
Protected from us.
The Monkey Jack became state property.
The river became a border, and I became a crime.
Eleven women before me. Each took her name from the tree that bore her mother’s weight. The forest knew them all before the state thought to claim it.
A man with dry boots explained our new rights.
“Twenty years”, he said.
Twenty years to live on land we have lived on for one thousand.
He smiled and told us we were stateless.
To remain is to ask the Forestry Department for water, for light, for the breath (ลมหายใจ) we were born with.
Last winter, my husband buried his blowpipe (ปืนเป่า) beneath a stone. He had used it twice in our marriage. Once for a small bird. Once, for a squirrel he shot for our daughter the night she could not sleep from hunger.
They made him a poacher. Officials lower their eyes to the papers when they say it. They know we take nothing the forest cannot give. The law, they say, applies equally.
It does not.
Not one of them has counted the days between meals.
The plantations creep higher every year. The loggers arrive at dawn, the tourists at noon, and we must produce documentation.
My eldest signs his name in Thai script now. Yaaw ~~ยาว~~
My youngest will not learn which leaves silver before rain, or which roots break fever. She will learn the word for clinic (อนามัย) instead.
A child should not die for the principle of a forest.
At school, they ask her to draw her home, and she draws a square with a triangle on top. She has never lived in such a shape. She has lived in a lean-to (เพิง) beside the rubber trees of a
man who pities us, and before that, in the deep cool of the canopy where the light pools green.
She draws the square because the schoolbook has taught her that this is what a home is. This is the part they do not photograph.
Soft erasure (ลบ).
Everything I know, I learned here, illegally. The river’s voice before a flood. Which bark the bees favour. Which way the ground runs to water.
Sixty-three years of criminal knowledge.
I am the protector of Pa Bon Forest and a trespasser (ผู้บุกรุก) in the same breath. That I cannot understand.
Last week, a young officer pressed an application form into my hand.
To apply.
To live here.
I spoke my true name.
The one the tree consecrated.
He did not listen. He pushed a ballpoint pen into my palm and told me to keep my mark inside the white box.
| รักษ์ป่าบอน |
I do not know him. He does not know me.
This forest (ป่าของเรา) knows us both.
And it will forget him first.
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Ashley Mangtani is a UK writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and a background as a civil servant in digital media policy, he crafts stories shaped by inevitability and loss. Blending literary realism with slipstream elements, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, Literary Garage, Half Day Moon Press, CommuterLit, Mercurius Magazine, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Expat Press, and Empyrean Magazine. Read more at ashleymangtanifiction.carrd.co
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Posted in Pride: June '26 and tagged in #boudin, #fiction, #flashfiction, Fiction