Dinner For Alice

The hunger was undeniable. Alice would awaken in the dead of the night, stomach growling, feeling stretched as though it might break into pieces. At first, always at first, she would try to be quiet, she would try not to wake up Ben, then she would remember that Ben was gone. She was alone.
It was the cold hard fact of this singularity that drove Alice into the yard, into the victory garden that had fallen into fecund disrepair since his departure. After a day spent in tears and rotating cycles of hair tearing and screaming, she would fall, utterly spent upon the bed and almost forget his absence in the dark desperation of sleep. Until her stomach called her awake, gurgling, forgotten and denied during the regularly scheduled emotional storms of the daylight hours.
In the endless torrent of wishes for her own death, for the death of Ben’s new flaxen haired lover, for Ben’s death, there was no time or motive to take sustenance. But in the darkness, after the exhausted blackouts, her appetite would take control and lead her barefoot into the yard. Under the pale white face of the moon Alice would kneel in the dark soil between the bug eaten chard and rhubarb. With one trembling hand she would scoop up a hand full of dirt and greedily thrust it into her mouth, wriggling worms and all. Turning over rocks she would lick at the scurrying surface, swallowing things that were still moving.
She fed with urgency and abandon, alternating between unturned bricks or stone and fistfuls of cool moist dirt. And when she was satiated she would return to the house, crawl with dirty fingernails back into bed and sleep until dawn, whence the appetites of the night would give way to the convulsive grieving of the day.
The nighttime excursions came to be extended. Rather than returning to bed Alice spent the rest of the night walking through the neighbors' yards, skirting around the edges of houses and tool sheds and compost bins, sometimes stopping to feed in a freshly tilled flower bed. In the early hours of morning before sunrise she would creep home, entering through the side gate, back into the yard, through the back door.
Pleasantly tired, she could sleep away the hours of the day. She tacked cardboard over the windows to keep the light out. As long as the sun was barred from the house, grieving could be suspended. Alice rested peacefully in her dirty bed, a layer of soil accumulating between the sheets. Waking after dark, her stomach crying with pain, she came to rise instantly with the knowledge that she was alone, that there was no one who could see her, no one who could stop her from doing what she wanted to do, no one to stop her from eating what she most craved. And what she craved for a time was the earth itself and the things that hid within it.
The change was gradual. Her skin first developed a certain sheen. It darkened. Then it began to harden. Her legs and arms had grown just a little longer. Her movements during her nightly excursions were quicker. There was a sound that her altered feet made over the concrete and asphalt, a soft skittering as she moved fleetly into the shadows along the walls.
Alice herself, resigned weeks ago to dying, accepted the changes unquestioningly. With a goal as simple as death, anything that happened in between was superfluous. As the changes came, however, as Alice pursued her appetites without regret, the death wish diminished, even vanished. Alice no longer thought of herself at all. She simply followed her instincts.
Her new form demanded greater sustenance. Neighborhood cats began to disappear. Soon the power lines bore pitiful photocopied announcements of reward for the safe return of a handful of different family dogs. One night Alice went out into the garden and spread her new pair of shiny black wings. In the city she kept to the alleys, terrifying the homeless drunks hidden beneath papers and soiled sleeping bags.
They had nothing to fear however, Alice had a hankering for something particular. She found it around the corner from a popular new nightclub; a young man laughing and wobbly with intoxication tugging a pretty young woman into the alley with him.
“What was that?” the young woman asked sharply peering into the darkness ahead of them.
“Nothing, nothing baby.” he cooed. Alice shuffled closer.
“Uh uh, no way, I’m out of here.” The woman broke free and hurried out of the alley, back to the street and its lights.
“Mary hold on.”
He called after her, but only managed to lean against the wall catching his breath. He laughed a little as he started towards the street and lost his footing. Alice scurried forward and took hold of him, mandibles sinking into his soft pink flesh as he screamed. The sound was drowned out by the beat from the club next door. Soon it ceased entirely, transformed into the gurgling of his own crimson internal fluids as they spilled from his lips.
Alice thought that he reminded her of something called Ben, although she could no longer quite recall what Ben was. Nonetheless, she felt sure that Ben was what she wanted, and this was almost it. She found it deeply satisfying.

Peril At Sea

White shirts and water and old men and old jokes and leather shoes and a long white wall and I found myself on a boat, a ship rather, a huge traveling machine that embraced me in metal arms. It was noisy and busy in there. The noise startled me out of the strange thoughts that had just been running through me. Dislocated fragments of words and images, visions of correspondences and breaking points, twisted thoughts, mangled thoughts, thoughts I immediately forgot.
I looked around myself and I quickly found my place within the crowd, I quickly found my allocated purpose, my duty, my role in the scheme of things.
I was on a large transatlantic ship, an elegant old ship heavy with history and tall tales lost in the deep blue waves of the high seas. There was a feast happening in the main salon, a sumptuous chamber which invoked a kind of luxury that I had rarely experienced directly. The floor was cushioned by thick red carpets that made you feel as if you were walking on clouds each time you took a step. The elegant round tables were all covered with white or pink table cloths. There was an enormous chandelier hanging over the center of the dancing floor, twinkling with golden light.
I was tired in the middle of all of the frantic movement, tired and slow and hesitant. So many people surrounding me and yet I felt all alone, totally separated from the celebration that was happening all around me. My hands trembled slightly but I wasn't really cold, my eyes watered but I wasn't really sad. I wouldn't want to say what I felt because I didn't have a word for it, I still don't. I didn't know why this was happening, that was clear. But then again, I didn't know why anything was happening at all, why anything had ever happened.
There were people everywhere, all of them enjoying themselves in a way that spoke of certainty and financial security and a kind of carelessness that came with it. Laughter came from all directions, waves of laughter that washed over me with such strength that they nearly pushed me over. They seemed to insist that I should set aside my thoughts, these waves of merry washed in champagne.
It was definitely hard to think clearly with so much noise, so many bits and pieces of unknown conversations, so many scattered statements, so many loose words. My mind would try to grab onto one phrase but it had soon been displaced by another, and my own chains of thought would be broken by the collective mental discharge.
I was removing the dirty white dishes that constantly piled upon the table tops. I saw several of them in my hands and noticed there were more to be picked up. I was wearing a black and white uniform that clearly distinguished me from the guests. The uniform was simple and standard: a white dress shirt, a black vest and a bow tie. To clear the tables was my job aboard this ship. At least one of the jobs I was meant to fulfill.
I looked around to catch a glimpse of my fellow workers. I could see other men and women wearing the same uniform I had on, each with a job to do, each with their hands full of dirty plates and utensils or walking back from the kitchen with freshly washed plates full of hot food.
While we worked, the crowd feasted, it moved as one large being of many heads and many arms. I spotted Vicky among the workers walking out of the kitchen. She was a quick glimpse of recognition among so many faceless strangers. Of course she was here. Where else would she be? I tried to catch her attention but there was too much happening and it was all moving too quickly. I soon lost her in the haze of movement.
I continued to clear away the unwanted remains. I felt so separate from these people, from the feasters, from the workers, from everyone. I felt clearly marked as someone to be ignored until needed, a part of the rumbling machine, a kind of moving breathing furniture.
"They are the Other. All that is not me. All that I can see and everything I cannot." The thought went through me as I looked at the guests laughing, eating, drinking. I could feel the floor weaving slightly under my feet, more than I was used to, more than seemed reasonable or comfortable. "There's no use in asking for a reason. They are that which you cannot control. They are that which moves beyond your grasp."
There was soft music coming from large speakers at one end of the room, a kind of soft jazz without claws that could be easily ignored and set aside as sonic wallpaper.
There was the tinkle of clinked stemware and the scrip scrape of knives scratching plates. Little ribbons and pearl centerpieces adorned the tables in a fixed simulation of living flowers. Round men in tuxedos bared toothy grins as I passed them by. Maybe they intended to flirt with me, maybe the alcohol had robbed them of their skills of distinction and they now thought I was their friend, their wife, their mother.
Women in satin and taffeta wore tight hair buns and white gloves. They never looked at me unless they had a particular request. Some of them danced with a cultivated air of nonchalance, some of them lightly swayed as they talked to each other. Their shoulders were bare and tanned, their faces were painted. Artificial flowers, like the ribbons and the pearls.
I scrambled to keep up with the pile up of dirty dinner ware. At least that was something clear for me to do, a task I could understand. I carried a toppling stack back into the kitchen area, wrestling with my own turbulent feelings which threatened to take me over, thoughts that slid down the side of my cranium like avalanches of words and letters spilling away from their original container. I avoided the steady stream of workers which all came in and out through the same door. I looked for Vicky among them but she wasn't there.

* * *

As I crossed the kitchen doorway, I was greeted by a rush of warm moist air. It could have been a relief from the aimless confusion of the party, a direct rush of heat that was clear and distinct in its manifestation. It would have been a relief but it wasn't. It felt heavy and uncomfortable. As soon as I walked in, I wanted to get out, I wanted to escape the sense of suffocation, the oppressive weight of the hot air.
The cook was a middle aged man wearing a huge white chefs hat, white pants, shirt, and apron. He had a clean looking thick mustache and large black eyes. He was leaning against a counter, sweating profusely and talking to a smaller man with brown skin and narrow shoulders. The smaller man mostly nodded to whatever the cook had to say, with an obvious subservience that made my skin crawl. I was not sure if he even spoke the same language as the rest of us. It didn't matter to the cook. He just kept on talking in his loud boisterous voice.
I felt very small next to him. Without realizing I was doing it, I stopped to look at the two of them talking, to listen to what it was that he had to say in such a loud strong voice that made the kitchenware vibrate in resonance.
He glowered down on me when I looked up at him, he stared directly at me while complaining boisterously about the incompetent level of help on these journeys. I immediately blushed intensely and moved away. He was obviously talking about me. He had to be. He had looked right at me as he talked. I felt afraid of him, afraid of his opinion, of his judgement. I was afraid and yet I would have given anything to have him like me. Obviously he didn't and there was nothing I could do to change that.
I heard louder laughter coming from the main room, even louder than before. I suddenly knew that in the dining room the situation would soon be getting out of hand. Intoxication would breed further intoxication and shameless acts of debauchery. This was the kind of party that could go on all night, growing wilder and wilder as time went on. A mad celebration of wealthy decadence. More than expected and yet somehow understood. I knew these things happened. I didn't look forward to them but they were somehow unavoidable. They could be surmounted, they could be dealt with. This knowledge lived within me in a place I couldn't pinpoint.
I walked away from the cook who was still talking loudly, his voice travelling like a strong committed melody over the grueling rhythm of the crowd. I felt his eyes on my back like heavy cables of steel that reached invisibly from his mind into my muscles. I didn't like it. I wanted to get away. I wanted all of it to disappear.

* * *

Without meaning to do it, I found a metal door that led me to the outside. It was an oval shaped door on the side of the kitchen, the kind of door you only find on a ship. I found it behind the shelves where all the supplies were kept. I had never seen it before. I had been in this kitchen many times and yet I had never noticed a door right there. It seemed unlikely that I would have never seen it, that I would have missed it each and every single time I had been in here. And yet there it was, waiting for me to open it.
I made a sudden decision to walk through it, without having a clear thought of what waited on the other side, without a clear anticipation of what I would encounter. I had no real expectations, no urge for discovery. I simply wanted to get away, I wanted to go elsewhere and that was exactly what the door promised. Elsewhere.
I stepped through it and I let it close behind me with a loud clang that resonated in my ears like a gong. I found myself outside, on the edge of the ship, under the dark cloudy night sky, looking at thick ominous waves that battered the ship like amorphous giant demolition rods. There was a hard rain coming down and a strong wind that made me shiver as soon as I stepped out. It felt somewhat good for the cold raindrops to hit my face harshly, tiny water projectiles propelled by the raw force of the wind that seemed to make the entire world shake around me. I shivered and the whole ship shivered with me. It reminded me of something but I couldn't quite place what it was. It wasn't something exactly pleasant, and yet I welcomed it. It was the change I had been hoping for.
There were two men outside with me, standing by the railing, their silhouettes framed by the night and the waves. One was about my age and the other one was much older. As soon as I heard them talking it became clear that they were father and son. It was also clear that they had some kind of official capacity aboard the ship, some kind of authority that lived in the structure of their spoken sentences. It was as if they carried their certifications on their voice and their demeanor. There was no need for badges when you could carry yourself this way.
Like the door I had just walked through, I had never seen them before. It was a large ship, full of strangers, but it still struck me as odd that I would never have run into them. And yet they seemed to be where they were supposed to be, they were in charge of a situation, a situation that involved me.
The older man was dressed in an elegant dark suit. There were golden cufflinks on his sleeves and his shoes were polished to perfection. He had undone his tie and unbuttoned the white shirt underneath it. In the twilight darkness of the outside, I could see a bit of his hairy chest, long white strands of hair that betrayed both his age and his old fashioned masculinity. I found it oddly attractive. I wanted to lay my head on his chest and go to sleep.
The younger man wore a thick white sweater. His pants were a light beige color and they were splotched with water. He seemed just slightly less sure of himself than his father was. But there was a hint of the same elegance in his movements, there was a touch of the same hard earned stability in his stance. His longer hair was a shambles from the wind and the water. The older man's hair didn't seem to move at all. It was as if the whole world couldn't touch him, as if he stood invulnerable no matter what came at him, no matter what violence transpired in the immediate vicinity of his personal space.
They turned towards me as soon as they saw me. Almost as if they had been expecting me, or at least expecting someone from the inside to show some level of interest in what was going on outside.
"We will have to sink the ship. There's no way around it." The old main said it with an air of finality that seemed beyond question. I nodded slowly, unsure if I was understanding correctly, unsure if I was even meant to hear this. Maybe they were confusing me with someone else?
His voice startled me when it erupted above the thunder of the waves. I sensed that I would be ready to believe anything that vibrated in those resonant timbres.
"Don't worry," the younger man said, looking at me with an air of tender nobility, "it's common practice. It's the only thing we can do in this situation. We have done it before. Many times. Everything gets wet but we survive. It's the only way. It's certainly not pleasant but it's the only thing we can do."
"When the boat goes down," the old man said, again with a thick deep voice that seemed the very incarnation of authority, "you will feel a pull on you...a very strong pull. The ocean will rise up around you and pull you down. You will have to swim very hard towards the surface, harder than you have ever swam before. You have to make sure you don't get pulled down. Do you understand? At that point it's important to resist the force that will be pulling on you. Just swim towards the surface as hard as you can, don't follow any impulse to give up. You will be tired, a voice in your head might say that it would be good to surrender to the force all around you. It will seem like a pleasant option. Don't listen to that voice. Set it aside and continue to struggle. Don't surrender. Don't give up. At this particular point, giving up is not a good idea."
Again I nodded slowly. I wasn't sure if I could even swim that hard. I looked towards the tall waves that slammed against the sides of the ship. In the middle of those waves, I wasn't sure that I could swim at all. I wanted to ask questions but they all accumulated at the tip of my tongue and refused to make the final jump out of my mouth. Instead I just looked at the two men and they looked back at me. Our conversation was over. I turned around to go back inside.

* * *

I ran back to the small cabin I shared with Vicky. I felt dizzy with apprehension and a sort of aimless confusion that didn't give me a firm footing on which to stand. As soon as I had changed out of my wet clothes, I started to put my papers and jewelry into plastic bags so they would not get lost or ruined. I sealed each one carefully, moving as fast as I could manage. I tried to not get bogged down looking at these things, but every once in a while I would stop to focus on one, a ring, a necklace, a tiny photograph, a little clay figurine. I would remember where I got each one, who gave it to me, who sold it to me, who was there when I got it. I would remember the incident that surrounded each item like a cloud of blurry images circling around an empty sun, a tiny thing that couldn't be grasped, a vortex of longing that didn't have a clear conclusion, a distinct end. Most of these things were basically worthless from anyone else's perspective, and yet they still held some kind of value for me, some kind of weight. I wondered if this would be the last time I would ever see them, the last time I would ever see anything at all.
I put all these little bits of property inside a small blue backpack which I placed next to my bed. My mother had given it to me when I was preparing for this trip. At the time I couldn't think of why I would need it. Just as I finished arranging the backpack and all the things inside of it, Vicky walked in. She was still wearing the uniform we had all worn for the party. Her long blond hair was a mess and there were raindrops on her face and jacket. She had been outside like me, maybe she had walked through the same oval door I found on the wall of the kitchen. I didn't ask her about it.
She closed the door behind her and started to undress. As she changed, she talked to me without turning in my direction. She talked in an exaggerated whisper. I looked at her naked back as I listened and I felt a mixture of worry and excitement coming from her voice.
"They are digging a grave for the boat on land. The captain radioed ahead to let them know what is happening. This is probably the last time we'll be together in here. Anything you want to save, you better hold on to it."
I pointed to the backpack and she nodded. I wanted to say more but it all seemed pointless. She was putting on a tight rubber outfit, the kind used by divers and surfers. I didn't know she had this kind of equipment. I had no idea where she got it from. There was obviously a lot of things I didn't know. Was my whole life a long line of avoided questions? A pattern of avoiding obvious clues even when they sat right in front of my face?
Up to this point, I hadn't uttered a single word while Vicky explained the procedures we would follow. She was being very detailed and methodical in her explanations. I listened as carefully as I could but suddenly I couldn't hold it any longer.
"I was not aware that there was even a remote possibility that I could die on this trip..."
She turned around and looked at me with wide eyes. She stopped in the middle of getting dressed, and just looked directly at me. I looked up at the few rain drops still shining on her cheeks. The yellow light of the cabin made them shine and shiver, like tiny stars on her face.
"There is always a remote possibility, at least a remote possibility. There's no such thing as total safety. Nowhere. Never. You should know that already. You should definitely know that from now on."
Again I nodded. These things seemed so self evident, things a child should know, things I should have been taught when I was growing up. But who would have taught me? I had never thought about the underlying possibilities before. If I had, I didn't remember. I had certainly never confronted them face on, I had never looked into the bottomless abyss that lurked under all my seemingly innocent choices.
"Did you give your parents a way to call you?"
I shook my head.
"Maybe you should call them. Just in case..."
I looked at her and then at my cell phone resting on my night table. I hesitated. Maybe it was better to not call. Maybe it was better to not know what was happening, maybe it was better to remain innocent just a little longer. Maybe it was better to find out until the crisis had passed and a resolution had emerged, whether good or bad. I couldn't imagine listening to my mother's voice while those huge waves kept crashing against the side of the ship, reminding me of the imminent presence of radical change. To hear her voice against that background would break me somehow. It would make me weaker and I needed to be strong.
She shrugged her shoulders as if she could read my thoughts.
"There's another suit in the closet behind you. You should put it on. We might have to swim for hours if we are still out on international waters. There's always a chance we might get picked up fast, but we shouldn't count on it."
I went to the closet and opened the door. I took out the suit that I found there. I had never seen it before. Again, it seemed strange that I had never noticed it. I ran my hand over its contours as if to convince myself that it was real. Were they distributed while I was working at the party? Had it been there all along and I had simply ignored its presence?
I had already changed into jeans and a T-shirt as soon as I came back to my room but now I undressed once again to change into the rubber suit. I felt somewhat embarrassed to have Vicky standing there, looking at me naked. We had both seen each other naked countless times, and yet this particular night I felt more naked than ever before. I felt as if she could look through my skin straight into my insides, straight into the inner forms that I would forever want to hide.
I could hear the waves outside getting louder, the waves beyond the walls of the cabin, beyond the edge of the ship. Outside was the Other. Everything past this wall of pale skin and this head of short dark curls was the Other. Everything. I was scared to be outside, I was scared to lose my limits, I was scared to lose my self. I was scared of it all. I felt small and weak and completely vulnerable, naked in front of the world which looked at me through Vicky's eyes.
All the stories I had ever heard, all the years of memories that I would never have access to, they were all trying to flood into my shaking mind. I didn't want to go outside to meet the Other. I didn't want the Other to come into me, to turn me inside out like an old sock and change me forever, damage what I had come to know as my world, twist it beyond recognition. I wanted to close my mouth tight so the Other wouldn't find an open doorway in the middle of my face, I wanted to close all the gates and tell it to go away, to come back when I was ready. And yet I wasn't sure that I would ever be truly ready. Not for this. Not like this. Not for something so utterly final.

* * *

I was standing next to Vicky, overlooking the open grave that would be the final resting place for the ship we had lost at sea. People had gathered around the dark moist hole, waiting for the broken bits to be moved in, broken remains of what had been a proud seagoing vessel not too long ago, a place to dream, a place to wonder, a place on which to stand and look out at the vast blue emptiness.
"It was a hard choice, to sink the ship, but it had to be done. There was no other way around it... you know? It could have been some other ship, it just happened to be ours. That's the way things are."
Vicky said it offhandedly, as if she knew I needed her to talk and she just grasped at the first thing that came into her mind, regardless of whether she really believed it or not. I felt vaguely grateful for her words, even if I couldn't understand them, even if I couldn't walk straight into them and make them my home.
I looked at her and she looked at me. Her blonde hair was still wet. My own curly black hair was wet as well. I could feel cold drops of sea water running down my neck, slipping over my shoulders to slide down my back.
Her blue eyes were even clearer than I remembered, as if they held the essence of hope within them, a kind of gentle hope that drifted easily over calm waves of doubt. We were both shivering even though the sun was already shining high in the sky, already slowly burning our skin, already slowly evaporating the remains of our cold midnight swim.
We looked at each other intensely for a moment, two sets of eyes wide open and staring, each looking into the Other, each exploring the wide open mystery that was hiding behind the Other's eyes.
What is it even possible for me to stare into the reality of her and not the illusion created by my memories? The question seemed more urgent than ever. The moment in the cabin, the moment when I stood naked before her as the ocean battered our ship into submission, that one moment had opened up wounds that I didn't even know I had, it left me with burning questions I couldn't quite formulate, doubts I couldn't raise past the boundary of my eyelids.
Was there really a Vicky out there or would I soon wake up to find that she had only been a dream? If there was no Vicky, was there a "me"? Was this "me" the thing I most cherished? The ship that took me through the oceans of reality until I came to let it sink into the turbulent vortex of the void?
And when it was finally gone, what would be left behind? Would I know when it was time to sink the ship, or would it surprise me like a little open door I had never previously noticed?
Vicky smiled at me as if to tell me to give up my questions. I smiled back but the questions persisted, even as she put her arm around me, even as I smelled her sweat, even as I momentarily believed that she was real, that she would remain steady and firm and I would continue to smell her presence as the years went by. I rubbed my nose against her skin and she giggled. A tear rolled down my cheek but she didn't see it.

* * *

That night I dreamt I was in the middle of a big feast but I was not a waitress. I was walking among all the guests completely naked. They all stared at me with big invasive eyes in the middle of blank faces that said nothing. The fact that they all looked at me without any clear reaction made me even more embarrassed, more humiliated to be so completely naked in front of all of them. So many strangers, so many people I didn't know, so many people I didn't want to know.
If at least one had tried to say something, if one had approached me with interest, wanting to caress my body, wanting to kiss my lips, if some of the women had laughed, if they had made a comment, any comment at all no matter how mean or off-handed... but there was no reaction at all, not even a whisper, not even a sigh. I just walked naked among them, unable to even cover myself with my hands.
I wanted them all to go away, I wanted them all to disappear and take away their wide open eyes.
I wanted them all to stay and talk to me, I wanted them all to be my friends, to love me, to want me, to cherish me, to hold me.
Their presence and their absence, both frightening, both desirable, both recurrently impossible.
I wanted to be gone but I was afraid to leave.
I wanted to vanish but I was afraid of the emptiness.
I woke up alone and covered in sweat, the wet sheets stuck to my skin. I looked up at the ceiling and thought about the waves that I had been so afraid of, the waves that surrounded me from all sides no matter where I was standing, the waves that would eventually take everything away. I could hear them crashing against the walls, I could hear them eager to come in to release me.
I was naked in my bed surrounded by water. No shirts, no old men, no jokes and no shoes, not even a wall. Just water everywhere, getting everything wet, taking all forms away and leaving me with nothing.

The Best Night Ever

I witnessed the best night ever. It didn’t happen to me, but I was part of it, guiding the events, letting out a tune every once in a while until we broke out into a spectacle of fireworks that moved around the room disguised only slightly by the turning disco ball.
We both drank slowly from our plastic containers of lemonade. Every time she took a sip her eyes would squint involuntarily and her cheeks would pucker. It was a look of pain, but she kept drinking more. It was the most rich, sweet and sour drink I had ever tasted, I couldn’t imagine it with the thousand extra taste buds of youth. She took another sip, wincing in pain and I laughed.
“Do you want me to get you a glass of water so you can mix the two? Then it won’t be so sour.”
“No, I’m ok.”
I offered to get her water several times until I realized that I needed some. I got up without a word and poured two cups from the self-serve plastic water container on the counter of the restaurant. When I brought them back to the table she drank greedily from the cup, perhaps unaware until that moment of how much her body desired something neutral.
Eating from my plate, I realized that this was not kid-friendly food. It was rich and intense. The mac and cheese was mixed with hot sauce and other spices that made it almost too overwhelming on my tongue. Next to it were two types of tofu burgers, one was fried, seasoned and crispy while the other was drenched in deep red bbq sauce. She picked delicately at the only quiet thing on the plate, a small piece of yellow cornbread.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take you to get a kid-friendly burger next door.”
I looked around the restaurant. The walls were a bare white except for the two large portraits of Big Mama Thorton and Muddy Waters behind me. Each portrait was five feet tall and four feet wide. They were painted with one shade of maroon that reminded me of a film negative.
Besides the paintings, the place was bare. The seven tables in the front section were clear of any decoration. Around the corner in the dimly lit section that might have been an old blues club, a disco ball turned its light on an empty collection of tables.
Before we left she tossed another penny into the fountain by the front register and the hand written chalk menu on the back wall. We walked next door to Nation’s burger. I had eaten there twice. Once years ago after I had been drinking with my friend Julie. I thought it was delicious, the best burger ever. After a few weeks and fond memories of my meal, I went back sober. The experience was night and day. My burger was greasy, flat and tasted of oil.
We walked next door hand in hand. There were several tall black men standing by the register, one had a head of dreadlocks hidden behind a large knit cap. As we walked in and I saw him I felt safe just because he was there. Another older man showed us his plastic bracelet, he had just gotten out of the hospital.
The man with the bracelet looked down at her and she was already smiling,
“You must be ten,” he said happily with his red eyes and deep voice.
“No! my sister is ten! I’m nine!”
“oh!” he said laughing.
She smiled and held onto the purple pillar by the cash register. A crew of three young Asian men worked behind the counter.
“What do you want?” I asked, “they have hamburgers, hotdogs, grilled ch-“
“A hot dog and French fries and a piece of cherry pie!”
“hot dog, French fry and cherry pie!” the man with the bracelet said out loud, sounding like Samuel L. Jackson on the verge of laughing.
A young Asian guy with acne took our order and we took a seat in the booth by the front window. The man with the bracelet followed us back to the table.
“scuze me, do you have any money I could use ta get something to eat, I bin in the hospital and you wouldn’t believe the weight I lost.” I reached in my bag and got a dollar.
Our ticket number was called soon and when I went to get it I saw the biggest piece of cherry cheese cake, a foot long hot dog and French fries.
“Wow,” she said amazed, “this is such a nice restaurant, they have such nice food and they must have spent a lot of money to put all these nice vases and flowers on every table. This is such a nice restaurant, I love it here!”
I looked at the red plastic vase on our table and the two red carnations in it. One carnation was dead and dried up, the other still had a bit of vitality. I looked at the rest of the tables, each with a matching vase and flowers.
As she ate her hot dog I looked around the space. I was slightly uncomfortable, several homeless men came in to get cups of water. There were two old black men sitting against the wall at a table, I wondered just how prejudiced I actually was given my anxiousness to leave.
One of the older men sitting against the wall seemed to be staring at me. I held his gaze, unsure if he was looking, then looked back at the paper in front of me. I read her a list of activities that were being advertised in the local free weekly while trying to give the appearance of confidence and relaxation.
A while later I looked back at the older black man. He nodded to me, not smiling, but acknowledging my presence.
She kept turning around to the man with the bracelet who now sat in the booth behind us completely focused on his food. She looked like she wanted to talk to him and she positioned her body in a way that did not completely shut him out with her back.
“I can’t eat any more without some water.”
I went to the register and got a cup for water. As I was walking back, a middle aged man, perhaps of middle eastern origin smiled at me. I smiled back and wondered if people were friendlier if they saw you with a child.
When she couldn’t eat any more and I put a limit on the amount of pie she could eat, she walked up to the counter to get a box for the extra slice of pie. She walked back with it, now confident of her place in the space. She looked over at the homeless man eating, looking shyly at him for his eye contact. I could tell she wanted to smile at him, to talk with him, but he was focused on his food. As we were putting on our coats he looked up and she waved,
“bye!” she said.
He smiled brightly, “bye!”
We walked out the front door and she closed it gently, looking through the glass in the door as she did so. She caught his eyes again and smiled and waved her small little hand.
“I like black people,” she said as we walked from the restaurant, “actually I adore them!”
We walked back into the vegan restaurant to use the bathroom and sit in their more empty section in the back to wait for 9pm to roll around. There were several more tables with benches for seats. We sat next to the wall facing the small TV which was shining with images from Soul Train, a show I had heard referenced so much but had never actually seen.
In the back the lighting was very dim, the light source came from the bright area in the front of the restaurant and the rotating disco ball.
A group of four young white people sat in the darkness at a table close by. At first she lay on my lap and tried to sleep since it was almost nine, but then she sat up to watch the images of a crowded room full of afros and dancers.
Playing constantly on the loudspeaker were old Motown classics. I began to lightly tap out the rhythm on the table. She did the same, using my left leg as a drum. Soon she hit the beats harder and harder, pounding into my muscles. When a slow song came on, I grabbed her hand and swung it in the space between us. She insisted on trying to pull our hands down every few beats to try and hit me in the leg. Sometimes she succeeded, other times I was able to pull our hands towards her, though our force never reached her leg. She would laugh each time she hit me, each time I diverted it, each time she was almost hit with the energy of our combined hands.
We were both singing, me knowing some of the lines, she just grabbing what she could at the moment. At that moment I was free, singing openly, letting my energy spill out without a care for its interpretation or judgement, for there was none. It was a state I may never have been in before, singing so openly-playing so effortlessly.
She looked at me, “this is the best night ever!”
Now I nodded my head, it was indeed a great night. Maybe the best night ever.

In The Bowels of the Gods

Keith blinked a few times before the glass came into focus under his nose. There was something golden and frothy bubbling in it like live amber. Beer? Hazily he tried to recall where he'd been, how he'd gotten here, and where "here" was.
After a moment he realized he was sitting on a high stool at one end of a long glossy bar. A handful of other humanoids were seated along the length of it, two of them, nursing drinks. The other three were clustered together near a machine that looked like an old fashioned cassette player, the sort he remembered seeing in a classroom in his youth, back in 1983.
That was his youth wasn't it? Presently it was difficult for him to identify who he was and sort through which memories probably belonged to this person.
He shook his head a little and focused again at the triad at the other end of the bar. It did look like an old fashioned cassette player, flat with broad white keys, but in the window where a cassette would have been there were touch screen controls, and instead of wearing headphones, all three were connected to the device with an output that jacked in behind an ear. They were all smiling dreamily, and occasionally one of them reached out and struck a series of keys which caused them all to shiver in apparent ecstasy and they would smile and nod to each other trough veiled eyelids. Then the next person would try their hand at manipulating the keys and the scenario would repeat.
This did not seem to Keith like a familiar activity. Instinctively he reached behind his ear and felt for the jack. Shock rippled through him and his jaw dropped a little when his fingertips encountered a small round opening there. Apparently, it should be familiar to him.
Vaguely he noted a curtained stage upon which a woman with black make up smudged all over her eyes was performing a rendition of Blue Velvet, singing in charmingly dusky tones while accompanying herself on a theremin. Her tangerine colored hair leapt up from her scalp ala bride of Frankenstein but curled so that it resembled a wave or a flame. A clingy white sequined evening gown, designed with gashes all down the torso through which her pale flesh peeped, was only slightly distinguishable in hue from her complexion. Individuals were scattered around a handful of tables spread through out the establishment. Most attended the tables closest to the stage, drinking or snoozing or examining liquid crystal tablets.
Suddenly, Keith was aware of the bar tender looming over him from the other side of the bar. The big bald man cleared his throat. Keith glanced sheepishly up at him.
"You asked for this." the bar tender said and pushed an LCD pad towards him, the muscles of his arms rippling under the tattoos. The words "Madam Blagva's Celestial Calculator" flashed over the screen accompanied by an entourage of sparkling shooting stars.
"Uh, thank you." Keith said and smiled. He couldn't believe that he had asked for this. He had no idea what it was or how it worked. He sat and gazed numbly at it. The bar tender was watching him. Keith squirmed.
"It's been a while since I've used one of these..." he ventured in an attempt at explanation. The bartender raised an eye brow.
"Just plug in your spider" he said.
Keith tried not to look too horrified or perplexed.
"I lost mine." he answered. Now the bartender raised both eyebrows to dubious heights.
"It's been a rough couple of years." Keith supplemented his original statement.
The bartender sighed and reached over and taped the pad with three fingers.
"Without direct interface you won't have any privacy, but it's your call."
A gritty electrified granny voice intoned mysteriously from the pad,
"Ask your question."
Keith stared at the pad. There were no alphanumeric keys. Timidly he cleared his throat and said,
"Uh…I've been going nowhere career wise and have felt stuck in a rut."
He paused and looked cautiously at the bar tender, hoping that he had done the right thing. He nearly sighed with relief when the gritty little voice encouraged him,
"Go on."
"Well, I discovered a book called 'Earth Sun Moon' put out by Wooden books and I drafted a 'celestescope' that charts the moon, sun, mercury, venus mars, jupiter, saturn... I found that saturn has been in retrograde in my sign since 2007 and is getting ready to leave, finally, as far as I can tell, sometime in July, and resume its usual motions through the rest of the signs, not to land in mine again for around another thirty years.”
“And?” the pad croaked. Keith swallowed hard.
“I guess I'm asking... is there light at the end of the tunnel? I guess I already am feeling free-er, less restricted..."
He trailed off and waited for an uncomfortable moment. The bartender, he was a tad chagrined to notice, was still watching and listening intently from the same location while polishing glasses with a white towel.
The gritty voice erupted from the pad once again.
"There is always light at the end of the tunnel; though sometimes it is a train.", it cackled crone-like while an image of a train sprang into motion on the screen and then cut away to another image of saturn and its rings which faded into lady justice dancing backwards away from him. The video collage continued while the hag voice narrated;
"Saturn did go into Libra, and has now retrograded back to Virgo. It will be back to Libra in late July. Getting Saturn off your Sun sign may well free up essential energy for you. Anything that feels better, freer for you, is worth exploring. Saturn can be a useful teacher. Putting aside the frustration, consider whether this time of inertia has left any lessons learned."
Keith sat pondering as the bar tender withdrew to refill a drink.
"The light is always everywhere."
Keith was startled by the voice. One of the triad who had been jacked into the device at the end of the bar had left her companions and was now standing at his right shoulder. She was short and lithe. One half of her head was shaved and white hair hung down to a length just past her chin on the other side. Her irises were bright crimson and her naked flesh was a sort of powder blue hue. She wore what looked like a white buckskin skirt and moccasins and nothing else. Her breast were very small and the nipples were bright, almost as crimson as her eyes.
"The tunnel is our own creation." she concluded and smiled at him.
The woman seated a couple of stools to his right snorted over her drink. Her hair hung in stringy mouse brown lengths about her face and shoulders. She resembled a glob of clay that had been carelessly slopped onto the stool and now threatened to spill out in every direction. Her back and shoulders were slightly hunched, perhaps being tugged mercilessly by the weight of her considerable breasts and belly, all of which was wrapped in what looked like a hot pink Snuggie that hung off of one shoulder exposing her freckled flesh.
"I had a ten year Pluto transit to my natal Saturn/Pluto/Sun-Mercury T-square." she said without looking up from her glass. He noticed that something like tiny live fish seemed to be swimming among the bubbles in the aquamarine tinted elixir. "The T-square is a big, impossible, nasty combo in my chart that will never stop giving me grief and the period of that Pluto transit nearly killed me, quite literally."
She made a sound that might have been limp laughter and took a swig of whatever it was she was drinking, swallowing several of the fish. Keith strained to get a better look at them and was aghast to discover that they resembled itsy bitsy mermaids more than fish. One pressed its all too human hands against the glass and seemed to look at him imploringly with its blinking hyper round eyes. He deduced from that look and the frantic way its fins twitched that it was cognizant of its situation.
"Oddly," the woman continued, "I married a man just prior to the onset of this transit whose Sun was conjunct his Pluto and Mercury at one point of my T-square and had a daughter who had her Sun/Pluto-Saturn/Mercury at the Saturn point, conjunct the transiting Pluto."
She paused and drained her glass. Keith felt sick, like he might scream or cry or vomit, or all of the above. She swiveled around on her stool and regarded him squarely.
"In other words, my own actions, perhaps influenced by the transit, worsened the astrological aspect -- or perhaps just embodied it. The marriage was a disaster - he was extremely psychologically abusive to both me and our daughter, and the daughter was, even apart from him, THE most difficult person I've ever had to deal with. It turns out she has Asperger's Syndrome." She turned back around and tapped her empty glass on the bar nodding to the bartender.
"Anyway," she said as he replaced her drink with another swarming with the little mer creatures, "my point is that these slower moving transits can cause tremendous trouble, depending on how they impact your natal planets. Saturn is one of those that, in my opinion, can cause some of the worst trouble. Not only is it restrictive, but it's known as the gatekeeper to Pluto -- to the Underworld."
She took a drink and coughed, Keith imagined, as a result of some of the little creatures struggling on their way down the hatch. She recovered after a moment and pointed a finger at him.
"By the way, almost to the day Pluto left the sign of that transit, Scorpio, I took a ten-day trip overseas without notice to anyone. I literally ran away -- and interestingly, Pluto had gone into Sag., the sign of travel, and the placement of my Moon in a Grand Trine with Pluto and Mars in my chart -- a very powerful and favorable combo for me."
Satisfied, she returned all of her attention back to her drink, dipping her finger in and stirring her terror stricken captives into activity before swallowing them alive.

The blue girl, whose hand was on her hip now, bit the corner of her lip while starring at the other woman and said, "As the Cosmic Muffin used to say, 'It's a wise man who rules the stars and a fool who is ruled by them.'"
The woman didn't seem to hear.
"I was born September 16, but I'm no Virgo." a voice piped up behind Keith. He had to look over his shoulder beyond the blue girl to find the speaker. It was a man in a fedora and vest sitting at a table with an old Chinese man and someone that looked like the Egyptian god Anubis with six naked teats lined up in neat pairs. He had a fine stubble coming in all over his chin and his sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. His hands were busy with the business of shuffling a deck of cards and a cigarette hung from his lip.
"I'm not a Virgo because I don't believe that constellations, that by the way, are only crude dot to dot drawings, influence my life at all. Sure," he said shrugging and lifting his hands slightly, still holding the cards, "I could not be here if there weren't stars, but that specific ones influence my life is superstition born of desire." he began to deal the cards as he spoke. "The desire to find a cause, a reason, a measure of control for good and bad. It's hard to accept that good and bad things happen accidentally for no reason at all. We roll the dice every minute. Sometimes we win a cigar, sometimes we get burned by one. Chance is in charge.” He winked, “Bets to you Nita."
The Anubis headed bitch pushed some chips into the pot and the Chinese man with long white catfish whiskers responded in a similar manner. The man in the fedora raised.
"But take heart," he said grinning to the other players, "good and bad things happen to the same 'no one.'"
Keith felt himself reddening a little. So what if he wanted to consult the stars? He knew it wasn't a science, but somehow, he suspected, it had brought him here.
"Yes indeed," he heard himself say before he could master his indignation, "but there is this old maxim 'as above, so below, as within, so without' that has made itself known to me."
The blue girl put her hand on his shoulder and started rubbing it.
"Correct." one of her companions from the end of the bar said abruptly. The young topless Asian man had a long mane of raven colored hair. He was unplugging the cable behind his ear. The thing that came out of the port had eight delicate legs and stood in his palm. The iridescent cable was a strand spun from this creature’s abdomen. It cut the unneeded connection and walked along the young man’s arm as he said,
" So whatever was within that was out-pictured is worth exploring."
The blue girl nodded emphatically and pressed herself closer to Keith’s back.
"I don't necessarily believe we are 'ruled' by them, but I certainly believe there are synchronicities, meaningful connections that exist between ourselves, microcosm, and the heaven’s macrocosm. Whether that is wise to believe remains to be seen and is subject to change, of course. I can be somewhat skeptical at times." Keith said, a little distracted by the blue girl’s attentions. She was leaning over his shoulder, listening intently and smiling sweetly at him, so close that he could smell her licorice scented breath.

"Everything influences everything." the clay woman sputtered, coming back to life and rejoining the conversation. "No human being lives in a vacuum separate from the rest of the world or the universe and the forces that govern things do so across space and time." she said stretching her hand out in a sweeping gesture. "There does not have to be a human reason for something happening, but the universe works in the way it does, which is its own reason. And we are part of all that, though we feel separate. No scientist believes it all happens by chance. As Einstein said: ‘God doesn't play dice with the universe.’ "
The man in the fedora laughed harshly.
"A cute phrase, but false." he said. "Einstein didn't want to believe in quantum mechanics, but has been proven wrong. God, well, nature, plays dice after all, they’re called quarks." He grinned at his comrades. The Chinese man yawned.
"I frequently provide my liver cells with evidence that I don't care a fig for their individual lives." said Nita, the Anubis bitch, in a silky voice. "But then, I'm not THE God. I am just A god. And I have pressures on me that they will never comprehend. Actually, I only understand them a little better than they understand me. I am capable of recognizing and interacting with them, individually; but I have little call to do so." Thus saying she raised her glass as if giving a toast and then lapped at the drink until her dog-like muzzle could no longer be adequately accommodated by the glass’s shape.
Lumpy was twisting around on her barstool to face the man in the fedora. It looked as though she might slip right off.
"I don't see quantum mechanics as "dice" or chance. Quarks aren't random either. They choose what to do, but we don't yet know completely why.” She was gesticulating wildly as she spoke, teetering and tottering on her seat, “The universe has a purpose, I think, but not our purpose. We are so arrogant to think that something zillions of times bigger and more complex that us should do things our way. But if we can ally ourselves with those forces that are greater than us, it is not chance we encounter, but deep purposefulness of a nature not so much indifferent to humans as equally inclusive of all things, as well as us - meaning we are no more important than anything else. To me,” she sniffed, “ this is far more wonderful than human-guided purposes. Well, let's say human-led purposes are NOT wonderful at all UNLESS they can tap into the greater, wider universe."
Here she stretched both of her arms as wide as she could and nearly toppled over. She barely managed to catch herself by grabbing onto the bar and twisting back around.
The man in the fedora and Nita laughed and turned all of their attention back to their game.
The blue girl was working on both of Keith’s shoulders now.
"How did you loose your spider?" She whispered, "You don't mean that it died do you? I couldn't bear it if that happened to mine. We have a spare if you want to join us."
"Thanks." Keith said, "I think I better finish my drink though."
He tried to focus on the drink sitting in front of him. How did he get here? Was this because of the stars? Or was it because of the book about the stars? Maybe the stars were innocent. Maybe they had nothing to do with his present reality tunnel crisis. This experience may have been induced by a tornado picking up his house… What was the last thing he remembered doing?
Oddly the only thing he could think of was the little mer person pressed against the inside of the lumpy woman’s glass. It was as if it had happened to him, as if their roles had been reversed. He had been swallowed alive and this was what it was like in the bowels of something a zillion times bigger and more complicated than himself.
Desperately he downed the glass of beer. The bar tender brought him another one. Little girl blue was getting really serious about massaging his shoulders and back. He had a feeling she might like to blow his horn. If she was what he was "out picturing" then maybe what was within was worth exploring...
Then he spied her companions at the end of the bar manipulating the “cassette player” and shivering and realized that what she really wanted was to put spiders in his head…
The woman on the stage started a new song, picking delicately at the empty air over the black box of her theremin.
“Moon river, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day…”

Ashes

The sun shone in through the open window into the little kitchen of an apartment nestled in the Marina. Kim arranged the red bell peppers on a cookie sheet lined with foil, taking great care to place them just right. Soon her guests would arrive; her mother and step father and baby nephew Andrew, and on the other hand, her boy friend and her old college room mate. She would wow them one and all with her culinary supremacy, starting with these roasted peppers and finishing with a desert of sour cream dipped strawberries and brown sugar. With the peppers in the oven she moved to the skillet where she planned to fry some spicy Italian sausages. The olive oil was warming in the pan when the phone rang in the living room. She turned off the fire and hurried to answer it.
“Hello?” she said into the receiver barely catching it on the sixth ring.
“Hi Baby, how’s it going?” asked Max, her boy friend.
“Great.” She chirped, “Are you almost here?”
“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to make it.” He said. His tone was too calm, too untroubled. There was a stunned silence on her end. In a moment, however, she recovered her tongue and launched into an interrogation. She wanted to know whether or not he was high, why couldn’t he come if he wasn’t high, he was supposed to have been on his way a half hour ago, what happened, who was he with, didn’t he know how hard she had worked, didn’t he care at all, and so on. Her voice rose in pitch as she fired questions off with the rapidity of a small dog’s angered barking. His answers all came barbed with criticisms of her and relics of ancient arguments, insinuations of her own guilt in this matter of his absence. Soon she was crying and he was yelling and then she was screaming and his voice was shaking. They chased one another in circles with their ring around the words game, each participant growing more and more hysterical as the match progressed. The apartment filled with smoke. Kim scarcely noticed it until suddenly she was roused from her nightmarish entanglement via the telephone by the sound of the doorbell. It was then that she noticed the smoke. She could barely breath.
“I have to go.” she snapped into the receiver, “My apartment’s on fire.” And she hung up and hurried to the door flinging it open. Her mother and step father stood there with baby Andrew between them. They coughed and stared in horror at the smoke pouring out to greet them. Kim scarcely looked at them with her tear streaked face. All of the mascara had run off her lashes and formed morbid black circles around her puffy red eyes. They cringed at the sight of this creature with billows of smoke rushing out of the door past its forlorn shape. She turned on her heels and ran coughing to the kitchen.
“Oh my God Kim!” Her mother was saying, but Kim was already out of sight, braving the inferno. The smoke alarm began to howl belatedly and the telephone proceeded to ring and baby Andrew, not to be outdone at the fine age of two, joined in with his own wailing.
“I’m going to take the baby outside.” Her mother said scooping weeping little Andrew up in her arms.
“I’ll see if Kim needs a hand,” her step father said, stepping over the threshold into the smoky apartment. Her mother snorted in response and headed back towards the elevator.
“Kim?” Her step father called over the din, batting at the smoke with one hand. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine!” she shouted too passionately for the words to be convincing.
She came flying out of the kitchen and started throwing open all of the windows.
“It’s fine, it’s fine.” She repeated, chest heaving as she jerked the phone out of the wall and threw it on to the sofa silencing its jingle. Then she leaped over an easy chair, skirt flapping, and snatched the welcome mat from the floor. She was still vigorously fanning the air near the smoke detector when her old friend Emily stepped in. Kim’s step father had ventured into the kitchen and now re-emerged with a cookie sheet upon which eight small charred lumps were smoldering.
“What’s this?” he asked, eyeing the lumps curiously.
“Dinner.” Kim huffed before bursting into fresh sobs.
Emily who had been surveying the scene felt her jaw drop. Then she said,
“I’ll order a pizza.”

Snow Food

They cried out like little doves, their mouths open and pink and bare.
“Please don’t leave us!”
Their wails started to tear at the edges of her heart, but she had no choice. It was either wait and starve and appease their surface level fears, or put her soft white cheek to the bitter cold and look for something to fill their stomachs. There had to be something out there, because here, they had already boiled all the spare leather shoes and they had already consumed their small house plants and eaten the cinnamon dust that had settled on in their cabinets. There was nothing else. Nothing else they could close their eyes and pretend was food, there just wasn’t anything else to hold on to, and no one was coming to save them. It was them and the relentless snow. Three little bodies in the vastness of a small forest clearing that was just big enough for a small wood cabin and a vegetable garden that had long ago been buried in white. It was so beautiful outside, clean as a cold cloud, silent as death. Each bough was covered in a line of white, but it was a cold beauty, an unforgiving beauty that had no remorse for their hunger, it would not cry for their frozen bodies. It wouldn’t even notice, and then, more snow would come, covering them up like a gravedigger. So she had to go. She had to forage while she still had a little bit of strength in her muscles, while she could still walk into the snow and have a chance of coming back. Another couple of days and it might be too late. She looked at them, tears streaking down their pale cheeks.
“I have to go, you need to eat. We can’t wait for the snow to melt, I have to go now.”
She looked out the window into the nearly solid white landscape. Her body was motionless as she imagined herself out there, snow prickling at her soft thighs as she stepped through mound after powdery mound. And then, in a sudden burst of energy that assaulted her stillness, she went to the musty closet to grab her boots and her thick socks and her mittens. In the drawer by the closet was her scarf and woolen hat and she put them on with a stoic face and a thin lipped half-smile.
“Please don’t go, who will tend the fire when you are out?”
“You’ll just have to do it, you’ll have to learn as you go. Remember, we went over this, just put small pieces of wood on when the fire is small and when it’s blazing hot, you can put in the larger logs. If the fire turns to small coals, do not smother it with a large piece of wood. It’s very important to match the pace of the fire. Understand?”
She gestured to the stacked wood by the front door.
“There’s an ax over there, next to the pile, if you need to cut some smaller pieces, just make sure not to cut a finger off if you try it.”
She smiled at her little boys. They looked at each other, both wondering if they would manage to keep the house warm while she was gone. They were desperately hungry, and they were aware of their urgent need for food, but they didn’t want her to leave. They walked arm in arm to the hearth and sat on the warm stones by its base.
“Okay now,” she said pulling on her coat, “I’m going to go, I don’t think I’ll see many animals out today, but I’m going to look, even if I have to stay out there til dark, we can’t go on like this.”
The boys looked at her, again, they cried like little doves.
One spoke up, “Can’t we wait a little longer? Maybe the snow will stop falling soon.”
“No, we’ll be skeletons by the time the sun comes out and turns this all to water. It’s the worst storm I’ve ever seen. Maybe there’ll be a deer out…they need to eat too. Everyone needs to eat. Or maybe I can find some Douglas fir and take some of their tips, at least we could make a nice tea from them.”
The boys looked at each other, they didn’t really like the sour tea their mother made. She opened the door and a terrible wind filled with echoes and chills entered the room, it danced with the flames of their hearth and threatened to smother it with its cold whip. One boy immediately turned his attention to the flames, adding a couple of small pieces of wood to the relentless red mouth.
“Here you go,” he said, “you can eat this.”
“Okay, I’m going.”
They watched her take her first step into the snow.

Yossi and The Little Girl

“Daddy, daddy!” the little girl called. Her little legs took her across the marbled-covered living room floor. Her feet slapped against the floor as she waddled, she was only a couple feet high, having taken her first breath only 18 months before. “Daddy!” she called. Her mother smiled and knelt close to the little girl, “that’s not daddy, his name is Yossi.”
The mother and daughter had just moved into the condominium complex a couple of months before, the little girl did not have a father, but somewhere, amongst TV shows and the greater collective unconscious, she had quickly learned about daddies. The middle aged couple from across the street, Meg and Yossi, had invited them to spend the afternoon and the mother and young daughter were guests for a Sunday barbecue. It was a sunny day, the sun being the reason the older couple had moved from Boston to this southern California town, a town they always said resembled New England, with its mature trees and charming downtown. They had come here twenty-three years ago, bringing with them their two young daughters.
“Yossi, Yossi! Look at me! Look at me do this!”
The man looked over and smiled. He was a short, stout man with olive skin and a barely-there white beard that he refused to completely shave. His legs and arms were slender and muscular, but his belly was full and round and extended from his white polo shirt no matter how much he exercised in the evenings after work.
“Yossi, Yossi!”
There were different impulses moving through him, happiness and annoyance, tenderness and humor, they were all moving because of the little girl. There were five other adults in the house: Meg, the little girl’s mother, a man named Vince (Meg’s friend, and Marylyn and Ruth (another mother and daughter, but aged 55 and 84). The little girl called to none of them.
“Yossi! Watch me do this!”
He was not used to this, his own wife did not talk to him this much. He was not used to such overpowering innocence, such unobstructed attention and unashamed requests for love. His own daughters were grown, they had moved out of the house years ago and he and his wife had created a new home, a place of sophisticated style and marble and hard edges. It was clean and uncluttered, it was obvious that children had not lived there for many years. The only trace of his daughters was on the cluttered piano, an instrument not used for music any longer, but a place for a multi-leveled arrangement of picture frames that held the images of the two daughters: first as little girls playing with dolls, then as teenagers in pretty dresses, and then as young women. Long ago he had held them, protected and comforted them. But it had been many years. They had stopped turning to him so long ago, even before they left his home. They were his blood, but they were all strangers. Once, he lived with little girls that wanted to sit close to him and be picked up, but it had been so long. Now, he preferred a clean, quiet house. A home without dog hair, without anything that required much of his time or attention or worry. Now, here was this little thing, this little girl, barely two feet tall, who called to him constantly. Whether he was outside tending the barbecue meat, whether he was in the kitchen or sitting on the couch, the little girl kept calling his name, she kept running to his legs and hugging him. He smiled, slightly embarrassed by the love.
There were no toys for the little girl, but she wandered around the small downstairs and found the extra room. The door was open and she walked onto the plush gray carpet. There were a couple of piles of paper on the floor next to the couch and there was a mesh bag full of neon green tennis balls. She went back to the living room, carrying her find. Like nothing was ever more interesting, she pulled out the balls one by one.
“Yossi, look at me do this…” and with her little arm, she threw a tennis ball across the room and then ran to retrieve it. She ran back to him, a smile of achievement on her face as she hugged his legs.
“Watch me do this…” she threw another tennis ball and went after it. The adults sitting in the living room smiled while a barbecue smoked on the back patio.
“That’s good,” he said. He smiled, laughed a little, liking the attention, and at the same time a little unsure of how to react. He had forgotten people could love so openly. The little girl ran back to him and raised her hands, “Can I sit on your lap?”
The hamburgers were ready. He picked her up and sat down, he gave her some small pieces of meat and he held her while she ate.

Banquet

The old man walked up the wide sidewalk, right on the edge of the big city park, as the traffic zoomed by beside him, in a mad frenzy to get to the next intersection. The old man was draped in sweaty smelly clothes, several layers of them, which created a kind of force field around him, a field of stink that was almost visible in the sunlit air of this particular afternoon. Being protected by such a field, in a day such as this, made the old man feel invulnerable and safe, and he walked as if he truly had no care in the world, which was almost true, except he had been hungry for the last few days, very hungry, too hungry to ignore it, and he had just been lucky enough to find three cans of dog food by the side of a parked car. He took them without looking back, in one quick swift motion that would have looked like a single silver curve cutting through the green and brown of the bushes and the walls in the background, except nobody was looking so it didn’t look like anything at all. He placed them deep in his thick armor of jackets and shirts and held onto them with his left hand, while looking all around him to make sure that nobody was running after him, to make sure that nobody was about to completely ruin this beautiful sun drenched day by calling the cops on him and then he would have to talk and then he would have to explain and then he might even have to spend an afternoon in a dark room surrounded by angry men and desperate men and sad men and scared men and he would much rather be out here, in the open air. Wasn’t that the point anyway?
He looked around at the two joggers who purposefully did not look at him. Two white men in long red and blue shorts, talking as they ran, their T-shirts drenched in sweat, their arms glistening. The old man knew he could look at any civilian with impunity since they would never look back, he reminded them of things they would rather forget, they in turn reminded him of what he wished to remember: that what they had did not pay for what they lost and here he now had everything, for he had been hungry in the last few days but now he had food and that was all he was really lacking. That and a screwdriver or a knife with which to open the cans. For that he might need some help.
So he walked straight into the park, crossing the intersection as a sightseeing bus went by, several pairs of eyes landing on him and quickly looking away. He could feel the heat from them almost as distinctly as the heat from the sun itself, and they were all fuckers, he said to himself, they didn’t know what life was really about, how could they, not up there in their red bus staring out at the world as if it was some goddamn movie. This was no movie, not a drama, not a comedy, not a thriller, not a romance. It wasn’t anything they could wrap their little minds around, all those dumb civilians staring down at him from their red sightseeing bus. It wasn’t for nothing that he was out here and they were there and he didn’t envy them one little bit. He would rather die than be one of them. Here, where things were real, where so many paths extended before him, covered in asphalt blue and sidewalk white and long leaf green, here, where he was free to take any of them or none of them at all, here, all he needed was a screwdriver or a knife to make his existence complete.
He found it in the form of a young Latino man with whom he had shared a drink or two in the past. He was lying against a tree, on the edge of a dark patch of green bushes and he looked up at the old man and said “hello” and the old man looked down at him and nodded and then he said, “hey, you hungry?” and the Latino man nodded and the old man said, “I’ve got some food but I will need something to open a can with. I’ll share with you if you have something” and the Latino man asked, “Is this some kind of trick or something?” and the old man shook his head, and he didn’t take any offense to the question because he would have asked the same question if someone had made the same suggestion to him. It was all a dance, a dance he himself had danced a thousand times.
Soon enough the young Latino man said, “look, let’s go up behind the big white building… there’s some tables there and there’s hardly ever any people…” and the old man nodded and he knew the place that the young man meant so they walked off together. Now they both felt the heat of people’s eyes as they stared briefly at them, crossing the main road, walking slowly up the little curved road that lead out of the park, and then finally turning onto the little paved path and onto the abandoned little courtyard. They sat in front of each other on the old dirty wooden tables and then the old man took out the cans and the young man nodded and said, “yeah, these look good, very good…” and the old man couldn’t resist so he said, “yeah, I told you… we’re gonna have ourselves a banquet today!” The young man nodded with eager approval. Then he took out a big long screwdriver that was crusted over with rust and dirt and he went right to work on opening the three cans.
Just as the high pitched sound of the metal being cut was starting to echo lightly over the overgrown pavement, there was movement from a bench just a few feet away. A second old man got up from where he had been sleeping, lying out in the sun, his back on the little green bench, his already sunburned face staring up at the empty sky. He saw them sitting at the old table and opening the cans. He could smell the rich scent of the dog food and he nodded with instant recognition, and then he said, “You got something good there…can I have the leftovers…?”
The first old man took a deep breath and regretted having come here, and maybe he could have had three cans all to himself if he had a screwdriver or a knife to begin with, but now it was two and now it was three and he couldn’t just eat happily while this old man sat there staring at him, because it would be too much like him staring at people eating, while he was trembling with gut wrenching hunger. He didn’t know how they could do it. He only knew he had never learned the skill. Maybe some other day this old man would have had three cans of dog food and he would be the one whose stomach was growling and then he would remember the day he ate while the other one stared at him with animal need. It was all too much to think about so he just said, “well, we got three of them, and one of them is kind of dented… you can have that one…” and the young man looked up at him, just a bit annoyed that his work was being given away. But it was too late, because the second old man was already sitting beside them, and all their various smells combined into a single cloud of deep aroma. They ate quietly for it wasn’t that often that they had such a rich dinner and it wouldn’t do to talk in such a special occasion. Every so often they stared at each other, but none of them had anything to say, so then they just ate some more.
The first old man smiled. They sure didn’t know what they were missing, the civilians, nothing like being out here under the sky, eating and knowing that there is no care in the world, no care at all. No worries, no future, no past. Just three cans of dog food and the warm company of strangers.

Destroyer

The destroyer laughed, looking up at the blackened heavens. All above was a blanket of glittering lights, the stars hung in the sky, low, like fruit waiting to be picked by a youngster with sticky hands. The destroyer laughed. The stripes on his sleeve attested to a long-distant past, the battles he had survived, the men he had killed and the ones he had saved. The captain beside him shrugged, he could not laugh with a man who so resembled a skeleton, a creature that had once only existed in the minds of little boys. But the apparition before him was real, as real as the worries that clung to the edges of his being, as real as the wind that brushed close to him like the wife he used to know. There was nothing he could do, he was a powerless lump of skin, shrouded by white flesh and a baggage of pain that rested on his shoulders like heavy bricks. Another chorus of laughs strung his ears, the captain raised his head, following the gaze of the destroyer to the flashing lights above. The stars where out of his control, just like the ship. Above, they moved by the whims of other forces, they would never answer to firepower, they would not respond to taunts of abuse or even soft kisses. Just as everything else, they were beyond his sphere of influence and it was pointless to wrestle with that simple truth.
He shook his head regretfully, and looked to the destroyer. Before him was a tube of metal and steel and white teeth painted like a picket fence. This was no man, but there were no other words to describe this being of decrepit laughter and sickly smells.
The ship bounced reassuringly. The waves were calm, the ocean was a baby asleep, its dreams moving quietly with the sharks below. The captain looked at his watch, the second hand moved slowly, too slowly, as slow as death seemed to approach his hell. Dawn herself seemed just out of reach. Why did she tempt him so? His memories of her were soft… bright golden rays that chased waves from their mountainous forms, pink clouds that announced the rising orb. He watched the movement of time. The hand moved slowly.
The destroyer let out another laugh.
The captain knew he was engaged in a battle that he could not win. The forces were too strong, too violent… even for a man like him. He still had shreds of a conscience, he still felt pain. The others did not.
He was surrounded by a horde of strangers who looked more like vampires and walking skeletons than the humans he remembered. Was he the lone survivor in a game of savages? For a second, he debated his own will. How long would it be until he became like them? How long could his stomach growl before he began to feast on human flesh? Before he went into the ship’s chambers and found the softest girl available and he began to chew on her breasts, bite by bite. There were plenty of girls below, their pastel dresses stained in blood and soot. There were plenty of them, plenty of food for a ship full of animals, hungry cannibals that had not seen the beauty of the moon for years.
The stars continued to shine, but the moon had begun to punish them, taking away their light, blinding them to the movement of a larger time, a larger cycle. Without the moon, they would have died on the sea had they not come across the lost ship, after months adrift.
The lost ship was like a gift from a maker who had given up on existence. When they had climbed aboard, they discovered the ship had a full belly of ample women and their men were too soft to stop the destroyer. He had walked right up to the captain and in minutes had turned him into their first meal in weeks. With the captain gone, and a pile of soft men who knew nothing of true savagery, they made a stew of the men and brought the women aboard as prisoners, as food to be stored til the next meal was needed. Now, with ample supplies, each man, each thing resembling a man, could have what he liked. A nipple, an arm, a piece of a lip. There was plenty for all. The old captain heard the belly of the destroyer rumble, the thing laughed and began to walk towards the lower chamber of the ship.

A Gathering of Ghosts

It is a crisp San Francisco afternoon, with the sun and the wind balancing each other so that those who love the heat never get too cold and those who prefer the cold never get too hot. The wind from a passing white bus whips a long piece of hair from my loose bun and I feel the buzzing energy of the city streets. I am standing at a busy intersection, the long store laden Powell St. is behind me, and in front of me, across the busy Market Street, is the lavish Westfield Mall. Powell St never physically meets Market St. Between the two streets is a large island of cement which funnels into the two wide sidewalks that run from east to west on Market St. At the end of Powell St, right before the large cement island, is the main boarding station for the famous San Francisco trolley cars. There is a continuous long line of people standing around the curving roped poles that are there to keep them in order. Men with cameras around their necks board the blond wooden cars and hold on to the golden poles. I watch them lean out of the trolley as they make their way up Powell St.
Sharing the same cement space are a handful of street vendors. Their small wooden carts, which line the green metal fence on the periphery, are covered in metal jewelry made from forks bent into dozens of shapes, beaded necklaces and friendship bracelets. There are screeching buses and cars that zoom along Market St. An endless crowd flows down Powell street, laden with shopping bags. Here, in this land of consumer frenzy, is also the boundary between the world of opulence and the land of the destitute. Less than a block away, the street turns into an urban hell, where the red lights of old and dirty porn shops glare over the homeless drunks who sleep in the forgotten corners of broken buildings. The rag covered men and the shrunken faced women spill over into this clean, well ordered financial zone. On the strip of pedestrian concrete, an aging black man, with gray in his beard, holds a neon pink picket sign which says "Jesus loves You." People walk by him as if he was just inanimate feature of the landscape.
Next to me is a small card table with voter registration forms and Obama T-shirts and buttons. The table is staffed by a tough looking black man who is probably about 30 years old. His eyes are hidden by his black lens sunglasses and the image of Obama’s face on his shirt is outlined in gold. I watch him for a while, standing erect and proud, with his hands in his pockets. For most of the afternoon he folds and re-folds his pile of political T-shirts and constantly rearranges the contents of the table…moving buttons and making it all look more clean and organized. Next to him is a muscular black busker wearing sunglasses. He is topless and wears loose maroon basketball shorts, tap shoes and white socks. He has set up a small square of wood for his tap platform. There is a small amplifier right beside him, on top of which is a laptop, which he occasionally fumbles with to change his playlist. Every now and then, he tap dances, drawing a big crowd. When I first show up, he is dancing with an older blond woman, a woman who clings to her fading youth through gestures of fashion and makeup. He holds her tightly, dancing to an old tune and moving like an unlikely pair in an old Sinatra movie.
I am wearing an oversized T-shirt, which I have tied in a knot along the small of my back. It’s an eggshell white color and in the center is a colorful picture of an idyllic farm. The image is set inside a large oval frame, over which is the name of the company: Cascadian Farm My hair is tied back and I have a matching baseball hat on my head. I glance at my unrecognizable image in a storefront window. My job is to introduce the public to the company’s new product: dark chocolate granola. There are two pallets full of mini sample boxes. It is my job to give them all away.
The set up is fragile. There are two pieces of wood, creating a three sided base which forms the bottom of the table, and a long white plank of wood which forms the countertop of the table. But today, the screw has fallen off the bottom, and our three-sided table base only has two sides. It works, but a little extra pressure will cause it to fall. The table is high, about four feet tall and about 6 feet in length. On top of the long flat surface there are two dark brown woven baskets. To keep up the appearance of abundance, as soon as supplies run short, I keep refilling the baskets with the smaller boxes of free cereal samples. In between the baskets are a high stack of coupons, worth $1 off the price of a large box of cereal. I have put a box of cereal on top of the coupons, to keep them from blowing away, but every so often, someone takes the sample box/paper weight and the little fliers blow away in the wind, scattering like colorful leaves over the wide gray sidewalk.
My job partner, Kelly, gives me a five minute training and the disappears. I am left to distribute the samples alone. There are a group of people in front of me. They all want samples. The more people want them, the more other people want to know what it is that people want and the small group multiplies geometrically. The crowd grows larger by the second, as more and more pedestrians stop to see the cause of so much interest. There are little old Asian women, college kids, city workers in their brown and orange vests, middle aged homeless men in smelly rags, all of then unified in their quest for a "free" something. The baskets on the table soon are empty, I can not fill them fast enough. People are grabbing five and six packets at a time.
I am holding onto a large cardboard box, full of 50 small sample boxes. I put two directly into the outstretched hands in front of me, their palms open in a gesture of obvious demand. I cannot hand them out fast enough. In the commotion, the old little Asian women that barely reach my elbow are taking boxes of cereal out of the larger shipping packages on my right side and filling their shopping bags with the free samples. The mob is pushing and pulsing, trying to reach me, the benefactor of free cereal. All I see are outstretched hands all around me. They have surrounded me like a hungry third world mob. They are not satisfied with two boxes, they do not go away after I fill their hands with another package. They open their other hand, asking for more.
In their push towards me, the crowd puts too much weight on the unsteady table top, and the long board falls over; the baskets and the coupons fall with the board to the ground. As I bend down to try and pick up the coupons, the crowd realizes the source of free cereal has moved, and they push closer to try and reach me. I am kneeling on the ground, trying to stand, but there are people on all sides of me, all of them with outstretched hands. I yell for the crowd to back up and they move away slightly. I dump an entire large carton of samples into the small woven baskets. The crowd makes an "ohhhhh" sound as the basket is quickly filled and the rest of the samples fall to the ground. I buy a couple seconds as people scramble for the small boxes on the street and others reach into the basket. The people are preoccupied for the moment, and I fix the table top and quickly put out more boxes of cereal.
The people still want more. Once they realize they can have one little box of cereal, they ask for two. When I give them two, they want four. Some people want entire cases. One man in a green floral shirt comes back every 10 minutes, taking three boxes away with him each time. I notice myself getting possessive, wanting to teach the people good manners. Somehow, for some unexplained reason, I don’t want to indulge their greed. I start to be more firm with my offerings. I only give each one two boxes, no matter how much they want. When someone asks for more, I say no, a polite but strong voice with the deep sound of finality. An older man, much shorter than me, stands by my side, unwilling to go away, unwilling to accept just two. He keeps on asking, he keeps saying: "just one more… that’s all I want."
A little more is never enough. We seek to fill what cannot be filled, with cereal, with clothes, with sex, with money, with love, with pleasure. This voracious form is never satisfied. It can swallow the world and still look towards other stars with naked desire. I see this in the open demanding hands and the eager bulging eyes. I see it in the discarded cereal packets and the arms cradling many shopping bags. I see it in myself when the day is over and, as I slowly walk to the subway, my body shivers with the waves of endless hunger that demand to be immediately satisfied.

The Goddess of The Birds

The old woman leaned forward as far as she could, wincing in pain with the strain that the effort was putting on her back. She lifted the large heavy bag full of seeds and she placed it on the silver metal cart. She took in a deep breath, grunting slightly, and then she took a second breath. She leaned over again and grabbed the second bag and placed it on top of the first one. There were little beads of sweat forming on her forehead, like tiny transparent pearls freely arranged over a pink desert of ancient skin. The woman took another deep breath and then another. She then leaned forward for a third time and pulled up the third bag and placed it on top of the other two. All three bags were now secure inside the metal cart. She took a couple of steps backward, stumbling slightly, and she sat down on the steps that came down to the garage. She was breathing heavily. She sat there quietly, breathing and sweating, for several minutes. The little pearls of sweat had turned to transparent rivers that now made trails through the cracked landscape of her forehead. She took out a handkerchief and wiped all the sweat away. She stood up carefully once again and pressed a button on the side of the wall to make the garage door open. She bent over to grab hold of the cart and she started to push it forward. She walked out onto the sidewalk, then she took out her remote control and pressed the button that made the door come back down, and then she turned towards the east, letting her eyes wander over the distant buildings and the few stray clouds. She stayed there, in front of the closed garage door, for a few more minutes, as if contemplating her next steps carefully. Then she slowly started to move up the wide cement sidewalk.
It was a clear and sunny afternoon. The wind was soft and gentle, making the trees sway slightly as if dancing to slow music. Cars passed by every so often and there were people walking here and there but the street was mostly silent. The woman pushed the cart slowly, resting every few minutes and looking up at the bright blue sky. She smiled and her eyes shone with recognition every time she saw the blue vastness that reigned above her. Then it was time to move the cart again. When she came to the first intersection, she slid the cart down to the street, walked a few steps and looked in all directions. There were no cars coming but she still took a little bit of time to breathe, making sure that she would not run out of energy in the middle of the street. When she felt sufficiently strong, she started to push the cart again. She moved very slowly from one corner to the other, still looking in all directions. The next block had even more trees, thick with dark leaves and solid branches, and the woman welcomed the shade. She was wearing a large, thick beige coat and a blue handkerchief around her head. Her hair was bright white and her skin was a mixture of pink and pasty white. Her eyes drooped slightly to the side and her mouth moved slightly from side to side as she walked, as if it followed its own mysterious wishes.
The old woman crossed another intersection slowly and then a third, before arriving at the place where she had to turn towards the park. She followed the same procedure as before, but there was more traffic here. As she reached the middle of the street, a red convertible came fast towards her, braking at the very last possible moment, just a few feet away from her little black shoes. The man inside the car ran his hand over his clean shaven head in a gesture of impatience. The woman tried to move a little faster. The man turned the wheel and drove around her. The woman simply shook her head and kept on pushing on the silver cart. Again she moved slowly down a long sidewalk. She could see the tall trees of the park in the distance and the gray cement archway that marked her destination. She kept on pushing slowly, resting more often now, feeling the sweat dripping down her face and starting to sting her eyes. When she reached the main street in front of the park, there were several cars stopped at the light. She waited for the next one, hoping there would be fewer cars by then. By the time the next red light came around, there were even more cars waiting, but she decided to move anyway. She slid down onto the street and slowly moved in front of the waiting cars. Without looking, she could sense that the light about to change. She pushed as hard as she could but it was too late. Some cars were honking in the back and the motors were rumbling. She didn’t turn to look, she simply kept on moving. As she made it to the edge of the sidewalk, the cars zoomed by in desperation. She pushed the cart up and crossed the archway, her bent back straining with the great effort of every little step.
The trees and bushes in the park were looking specially bright green, and they outlined the clear sky with their greenness. There were a few men and women in roller-skates and music was coming from a small black boombox on the side of the road. The old woman smiled and a young woman smiled back at her, as she danced to the muffled beat coming from the small speakers. The old woman reached the corner and spotted a green bench. She pulled the cart over and slowly bent her body down to sit. Cars were passing by in here as well, and people in bicycles and joggers with little white wires coming out of their ears and couples walking hand in hand and a few kids running back and forth and ahead of their nervous parents. The woman breathed slowly and deliberately. She closed her eyes for a moment and the cars became suns that traveled through great nebulae of purple and green and the people were like great birds that traveled across the empty wastelands of space, where their voices had lost their meaning and had turned into complex songs of silver light and solid cold stone. She opened her eyes again and there were more joggers running by her and an old man wearing a gray beret. The old woman sighed and pushed herself up once again.
She pushed the cart down the angled sidewalk, letting her eyes wander over the curved tree branches, the bench where a family was laughing and having a picnic, the statue where an old homeless man was asleep, his sunburnt face helpless against the sun. She reached the final intersection where the street was very wide and it was impossible to know when cars were coming. She slid the cart onto the street once again and she made her way over to the other side, as quickly as she could. A couple of cars had to wait for her but there was no honking and that allowed the old woman to breathe easier. She reached the corner and she started to push her cart up the curved slope that led to the lake. Here there was no sidewalk and she simply had to trust that the cars coming behind her would spot her in time and slowly move around her. The woman moved even more slowly here because of the slope and because she was now feeling very tired. The sweat was stinging her eyes fiercely now and she didn’t want to stop to wipe it all away. Slowly, ever so slowly, she made it to the little parking lot and the wooden building where people rented the boats. She turned towards the left and pushed the cart up onto the cement path that surrounded the lake. There she rested, standing up, supporting her weight on the handles of the cart. She brought out her handkerchief and wiped the sweat away from her face. The water was calm, shiny and smooth. There were several couples out on the boats and many people walking up and down the path. A man in a light brown jacket walked by her and nodded in greeting. She raised her trembling hand and waved back. She smiled and started to move once again.
She reached a long stretch of grass that ran parallel to the edge of the lake. A trio of ducks was swimming just a couple of feet away from the muddy shore. There were tall light green leaves that sprouted straight out of the water. A little white dog passed by her, exploring the path and the grass with its tiny nose. The old woman took a very deep breath and then another. She looked all around her and nodded, satisfied and ready. The woman then reached inside the cart and pulled out the first heavy bag. She ripped up the top with her little wrinkled hands and she walked with the open bag towards the grass. There, she slowly flipped the bag over, walking on the edge of the path as the seeds started to fall from the gaping hole. A great cloud of dust was formed as the seeds poured onto the grass like brown and yellow rain. Immediately, the birds started to come: great flocks of pigeons and large seagulls, gray and white. They came in waves upon waves filled with enthusiasm and they collided with each other in great masses, forming a complex moving carpet of constant feathery excitement and eager hunger and need. The woman let the seeds rain down slowly, walking from one edge of the grassy section to the other, making sure the food was spread as evenly as possibly, in a long dusty offering of yellow and brown and black. As soon as one bag was finished, she came back to the cart and opened the second. The birds were now three layers thick and the sound they made was like a great orchestra of madness led by a crazed invisible conductor bathed in the waters of desire. The birds jumped deep into the mountains of seed, without fear or hesitation, grabbed some on their beaks, jumped back, swallowed, then jumped in again, ready for more. And even as the second bag was already empty, there were more flocks of pigeons coming over the green calm surface of the lake, called over by silent, invisible beacons. The woman opened the third and final bag and repeated her calm and methodical procedure. More seagulls came and more pigeons came, and even some other wild birds that were hungry enough to dive into the loud and fierce chaos that surrounded the mountains of seed.
The old woman stood back and watched the eager birds with a great smile. She nodded her head and looked up at the sky, then at the mountain, then at the lake and once again at the birds. For a moment her skin was not as cracked, her face was not as pasty, her hair was not as white. For a moment, the intense hunger for life that sang voraciously in a thousand voices flowed straight into her old weak body and, in the great open mirror that was the shining lake, she could see that she had returned safely from the deep pits of darkness once again. She laughed softly to herself, a little laugh of simple triumph and victory, and then she turned back towards the cart. It was getting late and she had a long walk home.