Momentary Sacrifice

 

For several days now I had been conducting a quiet, obscure war. A small war, private, untelevised… not unlike the wars of the mendicants or flagellants; those hungry saints who beat themselves with cords to feel closer to the unnameable.

My battlefield was a chamber of weeds, a sanctuary grown wild with disuse and perhaps mercy. It may once have been a storage shed or the bones of a forgotten greenhouse. But I had made it sacred by the act of tearing.

Each morning: one bill. Always a ten. Jackson's face torn in quadrants, one piece dropped east, one west, one to the wind, one underfoot. The rite was methodical. The sacrilege was exact.

I did it to destroy the root, to disrupt the wormhole in my chest that had twined itself around the desire for accumulation. A fetish, not of worship but of yearning, of obsession, of the silent panic that can wakes me in the night, panting for what I do not yet have.

On the second day, as I stood on the weeds, I looked down at the scrap in my hand, this worn, fibrous rectangle of power, and saw it finally as it was: a piece of paper. An object without essence. A body whose soul I had invented.

I saw then how much of my life I had given to these revenants of value. How many hours I'd sold to preserve the illusion of worth.

And then… everything became transparent: the bill, the chamber, my intentions, my body, even the leaf that fluttered past my shoulder as I stooped to place the second quadrant into the soil.

I began to cry, but not for the money. Not for myself either. It was the kind of weeping that comes when a person understands, for one suspended moment, that everything around them is dying, and they too are dying, and there is no villain in it, only motion.

I thought of the people I loved. How little I had said. How foolishly I had traded time for control and business, affections for assurances, letters for ledgers.

At the third mark, I halted. I made a circle with my finger in the dust. A magic circle but not for summoning. Rather for banishing. To tell the spirit of money, or the echo of my longing for it: Go.

There were no candles, no altar, no knife. Only the final shard of the ten-dollar bill, held like a relic between two trembling fingers, and my voice, raw, trembling, untheatrical:
“I release you.
You are nothing.
You are what I made you
because I forgot the deeper thing.”

And in that moment, not redemption, not transformation, but clarity.
Clarity in the form of weeds.
Clarity in rusted nails.
Clarity in wind and tears and paper,
scattered like autumn prayers across a forgotten chamber where I, a fool of the world, had come to offer what I no longer needed.

The Climb

We eventually dug our way out of the tunnel. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If we worked hard enough, we were bound to be successful. We had talked about it long enough. We had dreamt about it for so many nights that were like days, and we had sung about quietly during the days that were dark.
One night we clawed through all the muddled dreams, through the bright geometric nightmares, through unspeakably complex puzzles all made of dirt and branches and dust. And we did it with our own hands and we did it with our own voices and with our newfound language which easily disturbed and broke apart the thick walls of our established identities that had turned into heavy pieces of rock.

I could feel the heavy force of gravity the entire time – pulling us down, down, down. I saw old symbols carved into the walls as we passed by and kept on moving and many times I slipped on the outstretched forms of a few equations and algorithms for which I had no understanding or explanation.

Something may have helped us along the way, something that sometimes pulled us up, something leading us along through barely visible silver threads. But it had no name and it had no voice so we would never speak of it and we couldn’t have said anything about it even if we wanted to speak. We would never acknowledge its presence even among ourselves.

Our improvised songs travelled out ahead of us like guides, then came back as echoes and told us of the future. We wouldn’t let any force stop us. Not fear, not hunger, not exhaustion. Nothing would pull us back, we wouldn’t let anything pull us back down. Sometimes when I looked ahead I saw the same nothing staring back at me, nothing behind, nothing ahead, nothing below us, nothing above. But I kept on digging, and I kept on singing and I kept on speaking.

I awoke on the other side, naked and red with blood and bruises, encircled by cold and darkness. Bubbles clung to my skin, and the past dissolved behind us in a black puddle.

We all walked away in different directions then and I never saw any of them again. I never even tried to search for them. When I think of them now, they have no faces and they have no names. I am not even sure that they ever existed at all.

The Magical Cake

None of the four Plum children ever understood their great uncle Alexander. He kept a great many strange artifacts in glass display cases throughout the house and begged the children to be careful whenever they visited. Running within the house was strictly prohibited. While some of the objects appeared to be quite valuable, others seemed questionable. In one case was kept an ugly wooden goblet which Uncle Alexander insisted  was, in fact, the holy grail, though their mother always pooh poohed this notion whispering to them that he had found it at a garage sale. The same sale, in fact, where she had obtained a rather obnoxious chicken shaped lamp.

In another case what appeared to be a potato sack was nestled between a beautiful ball of solid gold and a ring encrusted with diamonds and sapphires. Nearby this display also stood a shabby antique spinning wheel and a case containing a shoe made of milky blue glass that looked as though it might fit the foot of a 12 year old girl. In one case rested a decaying ball of thread, in another a bejeweled statue, and in yet another some aboriginal instruments adorned with feathers and bones. But of all the oddities preserved within Alexander Plum’s home, perhaps the most unexpected was a cake of unknown antiquity displayed on a solitary pedestal beneath a glass dome in the middle of his library.

While Addi Boo and Baby Ray chased bullfrogs by the pond in the garden and  Buddy  pilfered cigars to smoke behind the garden shed, Tilly Plum  stood transfixed for hours in front of the cake in the library. The frosting was an odd grayish color, which she supposed had once been white and probably would have tasted of vanilla. She would stand there wondering what flavor the cake might have been and what flavor it might still be if one were to taste it now. But most of all she wondered for what occasion it had originally been prepared and why it had never been eaten.

As the years passed and the Plum children aged Tilly continued to visit the strange gray cake in the library, memorizing the contours of the shell borders, roses and drop flowers. She took to cake baking and decorating at home, producing many replicas for birthdays, special dinners, and holidays.
Baby Ray once complained that she always made the same boring cake in different flavors. He, of course, didn’t realize that for Tilly, each cake was a different version of one particular cake whose true nature she could never know for certain. On one occasion Uncle Alexander found Tilly in his library deep in her meditations of butter cream, whipped cream, and royal icing. By this time Buddy was off in college and Addi Boo and Baby Ray had graduated to pilfering cigars to smoke behind the garden shed.

“I see something here has caught your eye.” Uncle Alexander said, coming to stand beside Tilly.
She nodded eagerly.
“I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, no touching, nor tasting.” her uncle added.
“Oh no. I know,” she told him emphatically. “I can have cake any other time. I would never touch this one. I just always wonder why it’s here.”
“Oh, well, I have it because it’s a magic cake,” he answered lightly and squeezed her shoulder before taking a book from the shelf and leaving the way he came.

This was indeed food for thought. That brief encounter left Tilly with more, rather than less, to wonder about. In fifth grade she penned a story entitled “The Magickal Cake.” in which a well meaning fairy godmother gave the cake as a wedding gift to a beloved princess. The princess was killed by a wicked witch and the kingdom fell under a dark spell leaving the cake uneaten. Its powers went unused and unknown.
Mrs.Gruber’s comments were written with scathing red ink in the margin, “Why is the cake magical? Why even mention the cake, if you don’t describe what it does? The story did not have the three elements of a story. There is no clear resolution to the conflict. Points deducted for spelling and punctuation. C-”

Naturally, Tilly was incensed. She wrote her own notes in the opposite margin.
“Three Elemints of  A story: 1.The begining: A mysteryous magical cake is made. 2. The conflict: A princes is going to ruin the mystery by eating it. 3. The resolutun: A wich kills her. My story is about a magiCKal cake that survives. Not a stupid princeses weding.”
After re-submitting the story with her own comments on the comments, Tilly was sent to the principal's office. Her parents were called in and the school recommended that Tilly speak with the school psychologist. Her mother, accustomed to accommodating a variety of difficult people since marrying into the Plum family, simply nodded, pursed her lips as if concerned, and indicated that they would consider the counseling. She whispered to Tilly on the way out that Mrs.Gruber had been seeing a psychiatrist for years now, in the same building, in fact, where Mrs. Plum saw a podiatrist for her corns.

For Uncle Alexander’s 106th birthday, Tilly created for him a replica of his magic cake. It was entirely undeniable by this point that Alexander Plum's magic cake had impacted his niece Tilly. After high school and some community college, she graduated from Le Cordon Bleu as a pastry chef and opened a high end cake shop on Colombus Ave.
Now, two years and one lost relationship into the endeavor, her personal funds exhausted, The Magic Cake was closing it’s doors for good. There were some last special orders to fill on Saturday, and then it would be off to the unemployment line and probably Baby Ray’s couch. Nonetheless, Tilly arrived that Friday night, cake in hand, to celebrate her uncle's continuing health and longevity.

Addi Boo was by then married with two year old triplets. Recognizing the impossibility of managing her brood in his makeshift museum, she hadn’t visited Uncle Alexander since their birth.
Baby Ray, recently divorced, came by often to keep the garden in shape, and particularly to care for the pond. He was absent on that particular Friday night, the occasion of Uncle Alexander’s sweet 106th birthday bash, due to an unavoidable trip to Las Vegas with the soon to be second Mrs. Baby Ray Plum. With Buddy in Brazil, and their parents on sabbatical in Florida, Tilly was the only other Plum in attendance, along with Uncle Alexander, and his live-in nurse, Amalia.

Uncle Alexander was surprised and delighted with Tilly’s replica of his cake. Spry as a man half his age, dinner was merry, the wine flowed. Even after Amalia had cleared the table, washed the dishes and gone to bed, Tilly and Alexander talked and drank. On the subject of his good health he chuckled and waved a hand,
“Gads girl, you know, I have the holy grail to drink from if anything ails me. That and more to scare off death.”
Of politic a weary sigh,
“Once you’ve lived as long as I have you’ve seen it all.”
And at last, of family matters, laughter, until Tilly herself was the subject. Then, too intoxicated to censor her woes, she told Alexander all that burdened her, more than she could ever tell Baby Ray or her parents. Who among them could understand her passion, her obsession with her cake shop?  Who could see the loss for what it really was? Not just a failed business, but the end of a quest.
“You know Uncle Alex, I always thought, maybe one of my cakes would end up some day under glass turning pearly gray, a cake too perfect to ever have been eaten, some little cyborg kid or something, wondering how it got there.”
She laughed sadly at herself then, but Alexander sat silent and perfectly still. His eyes had acquired a fiery gleam and his back had straightened. His manner demanded Tilly’s full attention and she felt herself sober up a little as he rose and left the room without a word.
Within minutes he returned carrying the magic cake, the original in its glass dome, and set it gently upon the table near the remains of Tilly’s replica. Tilly stopped breathing. She could feel the goose pimples rise all over her flesh as Uncle Alexander took his seat and spoke slowly in a tone she had never heard from him,
“I have lived so long you know. You kids and your parents knew me as great uncle Alexander, and you wont believe me, but your  grandfather knew me as the same. As many generations as I’ve watched come and go, and because I endure, no Plum has ever inherited one of my artifacts, nor ever shown the slightest interest in them, with one exception, long, long, ago. That makes you the second exception.”
He paused then, letting the weight of his words settle, observing Tilly’s breathless silence before continuing,
“I feel a certain responsibility to protect the items I have collected, not only from damage but from abuse. You’ve read fairytales, I’m sure, and so you must know that the guardian of a magical item can only entrust it to one whom they deem worthy. At least, that is my approach.”
Gingerly he lifted the glass dome, exposing the cake, and set it aside.
“I don’t know where it came from really. All I have found in my research is vague. I do know that it was passed down through generations of Austrian Princesses. This is the cake Marie Antoinette was referring to in her despair, when she cried, 'Let them eat cake!' And yet, even then, it seems it passed untouched. When the palace was stormed, and the royal family failed to escape, somehow, the cake did. It was returned to Austria until world war II, and then it was collected with a great many other artifacts by Adolf Hitler. After his death it made it’s way into private collections, finally mine.”
He pushed a fork across the table to her.
“I don’t know what the magic does.”
Steadying her trembling hand, Tilly picked up the fork. Slowly she brought it closer and closer to the cake she had spent countless hour admiring, speculating about, and endeavoring to reproduce. It was not, she now could see, the most artfully decorated cake. But it was pretty, if simple. She brought the fork within inches of its pearly surface. Everything was still.
She felt, for the first time, the naked strangeness of the house, its contents, her uncle, a strangeness that had always been pushed aside made into something small and silly, but now it loomed, immense, unfathomable, terrifying, and real. Suddenly, against such a backdrop, her cake shop, her financial worries, her failure in the eyes of her siblings and parents seemed inconsequential. It was her life which was silly.

In that moment, Tilly Plum knew that the cake was truly magical, and that true magic shouldn’t be squandered on petty material concerns. At the last moment she withdrew her hand and set the fork deliberately down. She took a deep breath and looked into the eyes of the man she thought of as her great uncle Alexander and wondered at all the strangeness. And he, whoever he was, whatever he was, relaxed back into his chair, his face melting once again into a broad easy smile, and said,
“Good girl.”

Ready Aim Fire

Ready,
Aim,
Fire…
Ready… once again, as the circle returns. 
I can almost taste it as it curves along those invisible walls that make up the magnetic fields of our existence. The sound of that bullet, bursting forth in anticipated explosion, waiting, waiting as it pierces the air with hot precision. 
We wait as the circle curves back and we prepare once more.  All of us, here with our attention, as the stars tell stories from above. The horses neigh in the background beneath leafy trees. The smell of sweet, crisp water overwhelms the charcoal, earthy odor of our shots.
We lay in the brush. The dry leaves press against my sweaty chest.  With one eye closed I find my target, alive and filled with force, his gun glittering in the moonlight.
The sky, always dark with wide clouds that shift and turn. In the silence between bullets, before I draw from the endless cycle and aim once again, I turn towards the road.  In just a moment I feel its long dusty tongue lick the dirt from my rough skin. Its gaze of passive indifference opens like a wide tunnel and I see myself on horseback, riding west beneath a sky so vast and endless it brings tears and fills my chest with indescribable longing.
The road, it cares neither for the sun, moon or children of stars. I am nothing to it, it takes the salt of my death and turns me into the path itself.  I am the ground and move over purple mountains taking the silent message of choice up and up, zigzagging forest-covered mountains, down through the open ranges of the yellow valleys, through rain, over desert so parched and white that nothing lives, nothing can live.  The sound of bullets ding and clatter from above. The horses stir and I squint once more.
Ready,
Aim,
Fire,
Ready...

The Itch

The light was dark in the old barn loft. There was a solitary window that looked out over the nearly barren lawn, just a few patches of green left, trying to hold onto life as long as they could. Rays of light that illuminated dancing dust landed on the old man’s arms. He wore a long plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He stood nearly motionless, watching through the window as his most beloved grandchild packed the station wagon with all the essentials: a tent, a few folding chairs and a large cooler filled with homemade apple juice and enough canned fruits and vegetables to last three months.
He was the oldest of the grandchildren, the most wild, the most adventurous, the most like himself. He watched the scene stoically, the boy’s mother helping him load the back seats, the barren trees around the circular drive, the chickens that walked along the ailing lawn looking for breakfast. There was a flutter in his heart, and a deep body knowledge filled him, for he knew the energy of the quest.

The boy must go,
and he might return,
and if he does,
he will be different…
as it should be.

He had done the same, leaving his mother in tears at the door of their small wooden cabin. Her own father, his grandfather, had held her up with his strong arms, explaining to her in a soft voice that it must be done, that all who yearn must go seeking.
Sixty years ago, when he rode out of the farm in the most beat-up truck the farm had, he had gone off in search of the thing he could still only describe as an itch, a sort of uncomfortable feeling that gnawed at the core of him for a few years until it pounded and beat on the walls of his flesh and rattled his lungs. He ignored it as long as he could, until the only thing that seemed right was to leave and look for the thing out there, perhaps the thing that would give him peace, perhaps the thing that would give him a small rock to hold on to, some sort of line in the storm.
And he had gone, and he had talked to so many people and he had discovered something, and that thing brought him back to where he began, only he was different, and looked at it all through eyes that were both older and younger.
Now he watched his own grandson do the same thing, knowing that there was something out there that needed seeing through another set of eyes. The boy must do, see, and experience. Explore beyond the known gates of the farm, something past the family and social ties. The boy went to look for the thing, following the itch, the thing bursting within him.
The boy looked up and saw his grandfather’s eyes in the small window of the two-story barn. The window was nearly a reflection of the sky, a palette of blue and white, but he saw life behind the glass, the deep set eyes that had found their place within a stormy landscape. There was a solidity in those eyes, knowledge that held on like a rock to something even stronger, and when he saw those eyes, he was sure.
He turned, gave his mother a kiss, and walked towards the car.

Closing The Door

The house was always bathed in a yellowish hue, but this couldn’t be blamed on the light bulbs. It was the inhabitants of the chamber, the vermin clothed as humans, the sticky sludge that resembled normalcy, the fluttering shadows that projected life, they were the ones that gave the house its distinctive yellow shade.
The two inhabitants looked like a couple. One acted like a pretty girl with school books and thin tank tops. The other one seemed like a skinny guy wearing an oversized suit. That is what they were but they were also something else.
She tried to conceal it in the corners of her heart, in the caves where secrets hid and rested, where they spinned their wool and catched blood-filled mosquitoes with eyes that had long ago been sewn shut. She tried to hide it all away, but blood always found its way out under the door.
The gray cloud above her head darkened her perspective. The steel ball shackled to her ankle ate away at her voice and jingled with each step that she took on the pavement. The pain was written on her face.
The disease dressed itself up in purple spots and lay quietly on his skin. The house smelled of vinegar and burnt tin foil and the books absorbed the smoke like the thick leaves of a jungle.
It was just a thin string that kept her from going insane, an invisible thread that tied her to the world she once thought of as unique, as solid and real. She could only escape from her secret knowledge when sleep overcame her and sent her off into lands unknown. Then she could forget about her present troubles.
But at the moment, she was wide awake.
She could not describe the nature of the impulse that pulled at her will like invisible strings raising a wooden puppet. She couldn’t speak about it clearly, but she knew that she smoked from the hands of red demons. Disguised as the glass vase for plastic roses, hidden in the product of water and fire and metal and coca leaves that combined into a surge of power, there was a brief full body orgasm that could instantly color her green and leave her wailing without tears, hungry with no need for food.
She smoked from the bumpy skin. She heard the bells of their choir and sat still while the earth spun and her stomach took a ride on the roller coaster that always ended twenty seconds later. Then she stood in line once again. She called for the conductor, she looked for the tubes and the white rocks and the dirty spoons. And again she took the ride.
And when it was over, when she was on her knees and drooling and looking for the foil, she took it again. The same rusty car, the same plastic seat, the same eternal loops that held her with hard plastic handcuffs.
Now there was concrete and tar and little else. She wished to move in the warm contours of soil and sand that now only lived in brief dreams of nearly forgotten chambers. She dreamed of woolen rugs and tapered yellow candles, crushed slivery leaves and stone bowls of water. But this was concrete, hard and unmoving. And there was no easy way to escape.
She followed her body into the yellow room and found the spoons and the powder and the carton of baking soda. She wanted to make rocks from powder and hear the choir and shake with the bells. She tried ‘til 4am until the small bag was empty and every ill-cooked rock had traveled in wisps of smoke into her lungs.
She called for more in the shower and spun as the water drenched her naked body. Later, she sat on the patio, surrounded by dying plants and a created world that made no sense anymore, under the night sky that felt more ugly and brown than she had ever seen it.
She sat and heard the bells. That’s when she decided to go out.

Now she stood at the corner, indecisive about the direction she should go in: south, north, east…Did they all lead to the same place?
The streets ahead were gray slate and drab and littered with old sandwich wrappers and discarded paper cups. The printed slogans drifted away on the wind, forgotten like the half eaten French fries. The gutters were a collage, a temporary museum to the unwitting Mexican artist that had unknowingly constructed it. The dark roads were long, each one of them marked by sign postings and shiny buildings that reached to the heavens in false praise.
Clouds dispersed in the wake of their unmoving weight. The clouds moved slowly. It seemed to her that they moved without care, without emotion. Their form merely shifted and scattered by the merciless force of the wind.
A sharp edge played with the tension in her back. It applied to her inner radio the mute song of a 90 degree angle. It talked in the only way it could.
She still gazed in the four directions. A bus bearing a hundred Asian immigrants passed by her, rustling her hair. Taxi cabs passed by as well, one after the other. They were only blurred colors and shapes. She saw them as unsentimental players in a hidden drama that was just a few steps beyond her. They came and went on command, the drivers, their cars, the lights. She wished she could swim with them, a sparkling fish in their school. But she felt distant from it all, she felt like she didn’t belong where she had once been and she didn’t belong where she was. She simply didn’t belong anywhere.
She reacted with a grimace when a tall woman in a nice dress passed by talking on a cell phone. She smiled at a short Mexican worker selling strawberries in the corner. Acting on pure impulse, she drifted like a kite caught in the clutches of a silent hurricane.
She knew that she was walking right to the edge between pure realization and final death. Then came an elongated honking horn, the stretched out music of a car in flight. It flew towards her, found itself caught up in the coils of her intensities, pulsing with the cold movement of her secret mechanical life.
You are here, she heard in the distance. The cries of bats and ocean waves crept in, the screech of old brakes and country songs curled together like strands of DNA. Distortion like nothing she had ever heard before. Teetering, she allowed the weight of the building to hold her.
A large metal door was half open. There was noise coming from inside. Inside was outside, and there was no safety anywhere, so she followed herself into the open doorway, squinting at the darkness that enveloped her.

A college-aged boy in a white T-shirt and jeans stood in front of a crowded room. His round Asian face looked towards the white pull-down screen in the center of the warehouse wall. An unused microphone rested in his left hand. The room was dim, the only light source came from the projection itself, which was a picture of the same boy, in another place, another time.
She leaned against the wall looking up, looking at him looking at himself. In his flat calm face, she could also see the contours of her own. She wanted to see it and it was there.
The boy in the photo was in a light filled greenhouse. His hard city mask had fallen and he beamed into the camera, holding a red ripe tomato in each hand. In the dark room the boy looked at a boy that was lost in the past. He could not recognize himself. The face that appeared to be his own was that of a stranger.
The boy in the room had been overtaken by death. He stared with eyes blinking. He looked, searching, searching for the self he now knew.
The projected photograph was a sudden flash…something used to be different. For a moment, maybe as quick as the snap of the shutter, he was different, he had been different. He smiled because of tomatoes. His fingers were dirty and his car was useless and all his friends and family were miles away. He was no one to the soil, no one to the trees. But he coaxed life from a seed. And life was given. Birth happened, and the tomatoes were proof.
The photo which he stared at now with strange curiosity, was a reminder of another life, one that faded the moment he left the greenhouse.
A tarot card drifted to the floor. She saw it but the boy didn’t see it, he didn’t feel its subtle wind. It lay face up. A skeleton in armor trampled everything underneath him with the strength of his horse. The flag of death waved in the red sky. A fallen king was lying next to his forgotten gold crown, two children wept at the feet of the white stallion.
The boy with the microphone did not see the fluttering death flag beside his own head. The boy could not recognize himself. But she recognized herself in his projected picture.
The stench of her physical death would take years, but this was just as foreign. It was like looking at her own corpse, the remains of what once was. She had been like the boy in the picture. She could still remember.
Her wide open eyes looked at the being that was left behind. The being had been forgotten, flowering just for a moment. Open and light-filled and caught forever. Caught for a moment that would always exist.
Death came uninvited.
Death came when she began to think, when she began to be “herself.”
Death happened.
A moment of sudden life had exploded out of the rotting experience of a machine, and that moment lived on in the photo. It lived in this dim room, lived in the one moment when she allowed herself to watch. It was the reminder that flowers can bloom in the mud, that a burst of lighting can cause a fire.
There were no words for her sudden realization. No words that could describe the bliss of creativity and birth. Nothing could explain the smile and the love of two tomatoes and the energy of a being spilling forth.
She recognized herself where the boy did not.

It was almost dawn when she looked in the mirror and saw a strange woman from a bleak distant land. A woman in the clutches of a force she had no language for. A stranger from a parallel world, a whore, a student, a woman…all could be possible, all were placed before her for the choosing, like doors leading in very different directions. There was some of each resulting character in her eyes.
The bumpy hands were tight around her ankles, the choir sang without rest. That is when she decided that this would not be her path. She would not surrender to the demons that tried to pull her down. She closed the door and sealed it shut.
She felt them call for many days. The invisible creatures kissed her ears and played in the corners of her mind. She buried herself in books, she buried herself in the open sunlight, she buried herself in a burrowed memory of a boy she would never meet. Working this way, she washed herself clean of the powder. And the call of the demons dimmed so much as to resemble silence. And the silence was just the sound of cars and of old friends who would forever forget to call.

The Taste

It had been a month since he had them in his mouth. 30 days exactly. A flip of the calendar, another one lost to time. Lost to the darkness of the sparkling, a spinning orb moving through a sun-filled sky. One month since his entire world understanding had been flipped on its head for six hours. It was a bitter taste, but not something he couldn’t deal with. Just chew, let it do what it does. Lay back and let it come.
If anyone were to have looked in his window, if they had been hiding in the darkness of the garden, stepping on the bed of red geraniums that would have been colorless at night, they would have seen a teenager on a bed in a messy room. Just a normal adolescent, some books on the ground, CDs all over the floor, a few empty soda cans littering the ground beside a full metal trashcan that was overflowing with other drained cans and crumpled pieces of paper from a poem he could never quite get right. There was a black and white poster of Jimi Hendrix over his bed, staring straight into the camera in a moment of vulnerable strength.
For six hours that night, he was a teenager on a bed, at least his body was there, above a thick woolen comforter, his head resting on a plump pillow. His body was in the midst of adolescence, but he traveled that night, beyond the place were age is a number with arbitrary limitations placed upon it. What he had placed on his tongue that night took him away from high school and the small bedroom next to the garage. It took him to the other world, a place among many others that existed outside the realm of earth and the place of the human.
Soon after his teeth started grinding and his tongue lubricated and his throat swallowed, very soon after his body became a simple material which was absorbed quickly into the mattress. The mattress became the floor, the ground became soil and dirt and the earth itself melted onto a seamless black sky that held the sparkling possibility of tunnels in all directions.
He was there, travelling through a small space, he was there, floating in open black nothingness. He was everywhere, he was everything and everyone and there was no body or bed or existence. The cross hanging above his door became a simple shape made of wood, holding no meaning, no significance, just two pieces of wood, set at an angle. It was a pretty shape. A very pretty, simple shape.
For six hours he was nothing, nothing and everything and he kissed it all and gave himself to the black sky and the open sun that waited and laughed, hiding its secrets with bursting flames. He lay for six hours until his mother popped her head into his room to offer him a sandwich for dinner. She found a motionless boy on a bed, her boy, motionless, barely breathing. At the time he did not understand what was happening, he could not, for people and words had lost their significance and meaning, and his mother was just a moving shape that cried out in large, booming sounds.
When the six hours of nothingness slowly seeped away with time and when he began to emerge once again into the world of perceived substance and roles and rules, he found that no one was happy. He saw gloomy worried faces and the eyes of steel on men he had never seen. Later he pieced the events together through the various accounts of different family members and next door neighbors.
His mother, fearing he had been in a coma, had called 911. The police arrived in tandem with the paramedics and quickly understood what had been on his tongue. It didn’t matter to them that he had tasted the world as never before, that self had dissolved and each atom looked no different than the next. He wished he could have described it to them, but they were cold stares and metal and bits of flesh that could be called human, but there was no warmth, no blood for them to give him and nothing that he could recognize and take with open hands.
The people he had known his entire life, the things they had taught him, everything they said he would be, he saw it as it was, simple nothingness puffed up in a make believe world, they were shapes that had been given meaning, but they were only lines and patterns. But he could not tell them, they were metal and steel. They were rules. They were vengeance. Justice for them was synonymous with punishment and he knew there would be consequences for the nothingness he had been.

The Map

As the metal gate squeaked open and he stepped into the cool bright air of the morning, he could see his destination. It was just two blocks away from where he now stood, but there were worlds between them. A sea of gray sidewalk that hid within it all the siren calls, all the sunken ship of dreams, all the maps to hidden island nations filled with spice and mushroom and song and music that shattered the mind into a spectacle of colored light.
The worlds were always there, but they took a careful look, more than most could give. That, he knew. You just couldn’t see them from a bus window, or a slowly moving bicycle, or even on a brisk walk. They were micro spaces that required micro attention. It was true attention, and it was what he had developed. And because he had developed it, he looked harder to find them. So everyday he opened the squeaky metal gate and stepped onto the sidewalk.
He looked up two blocks and saw the sign of the liquor store on Lombard and Dominican Dr. It was his eventual destination, but as soon as he saw it, he put it out of his mind. There were worlds to walk. To get there, he followed the cracks in the sidewalk, letting them lead him like a well-made map.
Of course, he knew the way, objectively, it was a short distance. For any other person around him, it was a quick walk. And though he knew it could be like that, simple, fast, blind, he chose to move a different way. He chose to voyage.
He let the lines in the earth lead him. The earth that had long ago been covered up by man and his concrete and his dominance, and his shortsighted plans. But nothing was permanent, and the earth moved like a softly groaning woman. It moved softly and subtly, but just like a woman, its force was known, shown to all that could look and see her sounds.
The cracks were her revolt, her soft laughter and cry. There were cracks everywhere, long straight ones that ended at the asphalt street and the jagged ones that looked like lightning and seemed to move in all directions simultaneously. Everywhere were the signs of the shifting earth and shifting time and he followed them.
Each day was slightly different, each route deviated slightly along the sidewalk, leading him past small remnants he had never seen, like the forgotten penny, the just-blooming daisy that had found the sun. Time was no concern, the weather was no concern, it all brought new gifts. A new shift of light, or a droplet of rain that would splatter between the cracks and bring out a bit of dark brown earth.
He let the cracks lead him, and because he relented to their shape, they showed him things he would have missed. Though he didn’t look up, he could feel the energy around him. The quick movements of the bus, the lone bicycle that sent a gust of air over him.
They passed him in a second. They passed him and the missed worlds and they never saw the treasure. He could hear some questions from outside, or perhaps they came from within him…he heard the echoes…”why?” The questions of those not looking perhaps.
They were questions lost in the wind and he walked past them, drinking them, eating them, letting them roll through him like another breath of air. The why for them could not be explained with the words of a meandering explorer, they were deaf to his words and blind to his actions and his true motive. He walked through the questions, slowly following the path of the day.
When the world was walked, he would claim his treasure. Sweet liquid gold would coat his tongue and throat and he would drink it as though there had never been anything else. Nothing from the twelve years that had come before, nothing that would ever come after.
This is the day that worlds were crossed. The only day in which it could ever happen.

A Morning Train Ride

It was early morning when the alarm started ringing. I ran to my cell phone, more than half asleep with wisps of fast moving cars and a girl who followed me with a toothache. The colors of dreams moved with me as I opened the door from the bedroom to the kitchen. My eyes were almost completely shut and I walked with my arms out, feeling like a blind woman for furniture and a clumsily placed chair and the walls that now seemed to be in my path. I dropped to the ground reaching for my purse as the incessant ringing grew louder with each second, its monotonous call cried for me to join the land of daylight, the place where clocks and appointments and schedules seem to matter. I smelled the leather of my bag and reached into the cluttered guts of my purse. My fingers felt a wallet, a notebook, the red vinyl change purse, a handful of lipsticks and chopstick, I felt a couple pens, a roll of extra socks. My hands, which were now bestowed with the power of sight, whose fingertips were the only eyes I had, finally, in the corner of the bag, found the cold rectangular object. Memorized movements flipped the phone open and they pressed one circular button at the top and then the arrow to the right. The ringing stopped, and the small studio was back to a clear silence.
I walked back to the bed and lay down. My heart beat with the rapid pulse of a machine gun. I wanted to drift back into the current, but a thread of consciousness told me there was no time to spare, the night before I had already set the alarm a little later than I should, bargaining with myself that I could sleep later, but it would mean required swift action as soon as the alarm began.
And so, with a great blast of effort, I stood up from the bed slightly too fast and walked to the bathroom sink. Still mostly blind, I groped for the toothbrush I knew was towards the left of the sink and reached out with my left hand to the ledge by the window where a small tube of toothpaste sat uncapped. The brush entered my mouth and, as mint tingled my tongue, I opened one eye and caught the reflection of a tired looking young woman whose hair could have been a messy wig found in the bottom of an old cardboard box. A splash of water on my face felt good and I buried my head in a soft beige towel hanging from the shower ledge. Opening my eyes and looking out the blinds, I saw that the morning was young, the sun was still hiding beneath a layer of moist silver clouds.
My dresser drawers were messily opened and I reached for the first pair of sweatpants I could see. I put on some tights for extra warmth, then the sweatpants. I was headed for the San Francisco Bay, for the farmer’s market that was just steps from the water and the wind. I would be standing there for hours, ‘til the sun gathered force and burned the clouds to vapors, I did not want to be cold while I waited for the sun to show its strength. I put on a long tank top to cover the soft curves of my love-handles and another two long sleeved shirts and on top of it all, a mohair sweater. I wrapped my neck up with a long sequined shawl and headed out the door. Down the winding street I went, from my home and bed, from the warmth of my little sanctuary, down into the busy streets of Daly City. There were stop signs and red lights and cars and pedestrians, I went through all of them in a haze, as though guided by an angel of mercy. I parked a block away from the light rail system and, as I walked, I caught a glimpse of myself in a car’s dirty window. The image was slightly silly, slightly mad. Where would they think I was going dressed like this? I looked like a slightly stylish homeless person, the only thing that could distract from this perception would be the bright red lipstick adorning my pale lips. I looked again into another car window, “slightly insane”…but I smiled at myself, maybe as insane people do.
A voice rose from deep inside, “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks anyway, image is a mirage, none of them will ever really know me. The ones who matter to me don’t care how I look.”
I stepped down a flight of cement steps and into the station. There was a mixture of beeps coming from the opening and closing doors on the train platforms above, the low dull sound of a mechanical woman over the intercom system giving security tips and the sound of people and buses coming and going. Pigeons darted in the open-air station, some looking for a quiet place to sit, others searching for their early morning meal and finding no difficulty locating dropped crumbs. I heard their cooing, their flapping wings. As I rose on the escalator to the platform, there was an 8-car train with open doors. I stepped into the yellow-lit car and took one of the few remaining seats. The blond woman next to me, with short hair and a black trench coat, sat hunched over her cell phone, punching in text messages.
I opened my backpack and spent some time unraveling the long cord of my headphones. The night before I had set them and the Ipod next to my bag, in anticipation of the 20 minute train trip, thinking that I would play the “good morning song,” (as I called it) on my way. The song was seven minutes of electronic beats and melody that nearly always had a profound effect on me. For whatever reason, I particularly responded to this song. My chest would open, my heart would flower, everything around me would become more interesting, beautiful, tender, important. I would be in the center of this amazing mass of movement, travelling through it, as though it was all a gift from a god. How many times had I been driving while listening to that song, feeling as though everyone around me, disguised slightly in their metal cars, where brethren, a part of me that defied words or explanation? And so I had planned it the night before, as though I was planning a psychedelic journey or an invocation, I planned for the morning journey.
The train doors beeped and then closed, I watched the people rise from the escalator seconds too late. The train moved and we left them standing on the platform, seconds too late to travel with us. I looked around as I put my headphones on, I scrolled through the Ipod and found the song. It started, slow first, then mounting in volume. I looked at a middle aged woman who sat in the seat next to the doors. She sat with her eyes closed, perhaps wishing she was still in bed. One minute later, we stopped at another station, we lost a couple of bodies and we gained a handful more. A woman with a young child in her arms walked though the doors and looked desperately for a place to hold on to. I started to get up to offer her my seat, but the woman who had sat with her eyes closed got up and walked away. Another minute passed and we stopped again, a horde of people entered and they stood in the aisles, holding on to the metal bars and plastic seatbacks for stability. The song was beginning to enter its peak.
The little girl in her mother’s lap kept looking at the people around her, her head and eyes darted and then she looked at her big sister who stood a couple steps away, holding onto a chair back with one hand and holding the folded up stroller in the other. What was she thinking? I looked at the hairline of the young Asian man in front of me, his body and skin seemed smooth and young, but he had gray hair that speckled his head. There was a man with a dark blue suit standing up, he was wearing a lavender collared shirt beneath his tailored suit, he looked Latin and had dark hair and big dark eyes. He was tall, not needing to stretch at all as he held onto the overhead metal bar. A short white man entered the train at the 16th Mission St. stop. He was blond and had thin arms and legs and a protruding pot belly. He was wearing knee length khaki shorts and tennis shoes with little white socks and a salmon colored polo shirt, there was no mistaking that he was gay, the color of the shirt accentuated it, but it was his being, the way he stood that announced his sexuality. I looked at the man with the lavender shirt, a color many heterosexual men would run from, but there was no denying he was heterosexual, there was something very obvious about it. I felt them both, two men, their sexual preferences evident in their bodies and the way they stood. I looked again at the guy siting in front of me. The little hairs on his neck where dark and I looked at them with the whole of my attention.
To his left, an Arab man with a large nose read from a small book, there was a picture that looked like a very old woodblock print on the left side of the page, it was an ancient deity surrounded by floral embellishments and other blurry details. On the right side of the book was a bold heading which said “Morning Prayer” in English letters. “He’s praying,” I thought. Then he closed the book and put it in his bag and he turned his head in my direction but did not make any eye contact. All of them seemed interesting, beautiful and worth the full power of my attention. The baby with the big brown eyes kept looking quietly at her sister in between moments of staring at other passengers. “What does she see?” I thought once again.
As the last beats of the song faded, I skipped a couple songs ahead and put on a less familiar song. A very simple melody with three notes began to repeat every couple of seconds. There was a beautiful beat on top which seemed to move and move, taking my heart through landscapes and ringed worlds. Tears began to flood my eyes and I opened myself to all of them. I looked at the Latin man in the suit, my head tilted slightly to my right shoulder and I looked at his form. A small salty droplet escaped and went down my cheek, I did not wipe it away. The man, sensing something, looked at me. I looked back, hearing the music in my ears, holding contact, looking at him without thought, he was not good, bad, handsome, nice…I just looked at him from the eyes of an open vessel, he looked at me, held contact for less than two seconds, then looked away. What did he see? His break did not prevent me from looking. It did not stop the tears. I looked at others with the same sense of wonder without structured thought.
I looked out the train window as I felt the brakes begin to work, I was close to my destination point. The song was fading and I looked around me sensing that a wave had passed and now I was wet to the knees at low tide. I scrolled around the Ipod for a second, but turned it off. The train door opened and I stepped out, joining the line of people on the left of the escalator that walked instead of letting the escalator take them. We moved past the line on the right that stood in place. I reached daylight again and the downtown center where people in professional suits and skirts and clicking high-heels and tailored jackets walked past me. I saw my reflection again in an empty storefront. “Still goofy, but it doesn’t mater.”
I spent the next couple of hours setting up an organic peach stand. Michael, Fernando and I opened tables, set up the canopy and opened boxes of summer peaches. I was reminded of the moment in Pulp Fiction when Marsellus Wallace (the ring leader of a criminal organization) opens a briefcase. The audience is never explicitly told what’s inside, but a yellow glow shines on his face, as though the light from a golden sunset is projected straight towards him. When I opened a ripe box of apricots to cut samples, the light from them was just as bright, it was breathtaking and beautiful and I tried to retell the experience of opening the box for a couple of customers who commented on the pretty color of the apricot skin, but something vacant in their eyes revealed that they didn’t quite understand the story I was trying to tell them.
During a lull in customers between the breakfast shoppers and lunch-time, Fernando and I were standing together, gazing at the many types of people that walked by the Ferry Plaza Building. He looked to me and said, “You know, you don’t look like a woman.” I turned to him, all 29 years of me, “What do I look like?” “You are so slim, you look like a teenager, like a kid.” “Oh,” I said nodding. Knowing that in his eyes and mind, his words were not a compliment. He liked women, not girls. Almost instantaneously, I felt small, ugly, worthless. I felt self conscious in my sweatpants and messy hair, undesirable amidst the career women in their shiny high heels and form-fitting dresses. I heard a faint voice again, “Who cares what they think, it’s all image, he doesn’t know anything about you.” But I hardly heard the voice, I started to feel like it did matter. I went to the bathroom and reapplied some lipstick and tried to fix my hair, but there was nothing to be done. It was my internal landscape that had shifted. So open early in the morning, so tender, that a couple of ill-conceived words went in like zig-zagging daggers and sent the entire fragile newborn edifice sprawling to the dust.