Eye

 

I saw the main stairway of the old house
But it was closed, cancelled
The stairs continued into the lower darkness
into some kind of forbidden basement
a place I had never seen or been aware of.
This place was also closed, cancelled.

I looked downwards
Into the darkness
And I saw
Or imagined I saw
an awakened eye
which was my own.

I went to my room upstairs
it was more like a small apartment than a room
With a living room, a bathroom, a bedroom.
And on the white wall,
The one that faced the street
I saw
a single colored teardrop
seemingly fresh and alive.
Then I heard a loud noise
and the tear splattered
all over the white wall.

I spent some time
making sure all the doors were closed and locked
I was certain there were other people close by
Wandering around the house.
I had some trouble locking all the doors
since I wasn’t sure
where they were all located.

In the middle of rushing around
closing and locking everything
I heard a sound
That I somewhat recognized as my name
Then I heard it again
And I just heard it as a word
A word without a meaning known to me.


I walked down a long hall
Surrounded by gardens of grass and stone.
I could see other gardens in the distance
I saw a group of children
Led by two or three adults
They were all carrying candles
And raising them above their heads.

The man who was in charge approached me.
He talked to me as if he knew who I was
And why I was there.
“It’s a beautiful house…”
He said.
And I responded:
“Yes, it really is..
But it’s a bit dangerous…
Specially for kids.”
I was thinking of so many levels,
So many ways to fall.
He said:
“It’s ok.
As long as you keep your eye on them.”

Then the children came to me
And carried me like a precious jewel.
I became pink and new,
With a touch of purple
Maybe brown or light blue
Always on the verge of crying.

Forgotten Things

She walked around the toy store, letting children’s voices and warm forced air dry her clothes from the rain outside. There were colors everywhere, a rainbow of possibilities. Purple, blue, green and sparkles. She picked up a small stuffed wolf from a high wooden shelf among dozens of other animals and held it in the crook of her arm, holding it there as she looked at picture books and soft felt puppets shaped like peacocks and octopus. The small wolf, a little bigger than a football, stayed in place, a soft comforting presence at her side.
She fell into it.  The warm stuffed cuddly possibility of its unrequited love. It felt good, though she didn’t know why. It was somewhere hiding in the folds of thick blankets, furry friends and clean blankets. It was years in the past.
The wolf was intended as gift, but part of her regretted wrapping it up in pink and purple and waiting for another day, a coming night among family and a round table and birthday chanting. She wanted to take it to bed, have it sit next to her as she read another novel that took her into Greece forty years before. She tried to remember playing with toys, and she searched her mind for a memory when her parents had taken her to a toy store. Nothing came.
Later that night she called her mother.
“Can you remember any toys I used to play with?  I can’t remember playing with any toys.  I only have a memory of playing with that red sand I brought back from the Nevada desert.”
“Oh sure, you played with lots of toys,” her voice got very soft, with an undertone of defensiveness. “You played dress up and went to Deta’s for tea and worked in the garden. I bought you Jenga. You played with Blackstar. You had a bike and a scooter and skates. How did this come up?”
“Don’t worry, this isn’t a critique on your parenting, I just couldn’t remember playing with toys. I was walking around a toy store and couldn’t remember ever being in one. I couldn’t remember any toys I used to have except for a few Barbies.” 
Later she searched the motives in her words. It had been a critique, however baseless. She had wandered around the toy store, a little jealous of all the children inside picking out toys. She wanted a stuffed bear.
“You had Legos.”
“I never had Legos.”
“Yes you did.  I remember picking them up.”
“Well, it must have been when I was really little. They must have been the big kind.”
“Yes, they were. And you had a big dollhouse, several of them actually. Your dad was so proud when he brought it home for you. He was sitting next to you drinking a coffee while you moved the furniture all around. He was so proud.” 
Her voice was light with sweet memories.
The thought of her father sitting there so happy with his little girl brought the prickling pain of tears to her eyes. They had all come so far from then, down the dark road of adulthood and clashing politics and the black space that their words could not fill. Three strangers constantly filled with misunderstanding, doubts, anger. Her dad now could not sit next to her comfortably, he couldn't just sit and feel his love for her, feel her love for him. 
“You also had that big cardboard doll house when we lived in Sharon. It was big enough that you could get inside.”
“Yeah,” she said, remembering the structure in the attic with one small window in their three story house.  Remembering her sister there, just a baby. “I do remember that.”
“Oh, you do?”  There was a moment of quiet between them. “I think we watched too much TV together though.”
“Yeah probably.”
“I think that being an adult is much more interesting and challenging though. I can’t remember my childhood either. I think the further you get away from it, the less you remember. I can’t remember a thing.”
“Really?”
“Not a thing.” 
She knew her mom had blocked out the painful past. The weekends she had once talked about when her mother would leave her at home with frozen dinners, alone and scared while her mother went to the theater. There where other memories that perhaps she had forgotten, forced away, hidden. 
They hung up and she lay in bed, still only remembering a select sliver of her own childhood. She grabbed a pillow and tucked it into her arm, pulling it tight.

Eternity

Everything about her was different. I felt something with her that I had never felt with other women. Sisterhood. Something.
Whenever we walked down to the beach we saw dolphins. I never saw them when I went without her.
She wore this perfume, Eternity, and it was the only perfume I had ever liked to smell. Others gave me a headache. And maybe it wasn’t just the perfume, maybe it mingled with her perspiration, the trace minerals in the water that ran from her tap, the aroma of foods cooked with lemon and basil. It was colored by the timber of her voice, a soft but deep sound, slightly nasal, her laughter, a thing like a wave crashing against the walls of her chest before it hissed and bubbled out of her open mouth. 

She was the only Greek woman I had ever met, a student on a visa, sitting alone on a balcony overlooking the pacific where it met the Golden Gate Bridge and the Northern California coast, a princess trapped in a tower, watching the mist roll in to swallow the Presidio.
Who could save her? Who in a land of strangers, in a culture where it was politically incorrect to be a prince, where individuality and isolation deserved merit and everything else required therapy, who could rescue her?
That question, the answers she found in books and yoga classes and homeopathic remedies, everything else I have mentioned, that scent mingled with all these things. And as I have said, it was called Eternity.

In October I found a bottle of cheap perfume among a line of scents that called themselves “impressions of the world’s most popular scents.”
Yes, I found an impression of Eternity for seven dollars in the drugstore. I wore it to a PTO meeting. Leaves twirling in empty space between sky and earth, the fog of Pacifica thick and briny, the taste of hot chocolate from the Café’ near the elementary school, my children, still children in that moment, laughing and skipping and running into the arms of their playmates. Their little hands, tender and warm and smelling of dirt and graphite.
That scent came to be entwined with these things too. With sweaters and sitting in a room full of women snipping satin ribbon, the sound of shears cutting through new fabric, their voices, their stories, their children, my children, prancing in the halls beside us as we prepared for the Winter Bazaar. 
I felt a glimmer of it then, like butterfly wings on my cheek.  Strange familiarity or familiar strangeness, warm and glowing, like almost remembering the words to a forgotten lullaby, or waking in a dream.
Sisterhood. Something.
Eternity.

She was gone by then, in October.
Once when we had gone down to the beach we saw a bride and groom with a photographer. The bride's dress was long and white, the veil billowing behind her in a sea breeze as the groom, dressed in black, darted out of the way of the breaking surf. 
She had been married in Greece, when she was 18, and something terrible happened. Her love had abandoned her and she had been dragged out to sea with the other emotional and inarticulate things that whirled about in the cold dark currents.
The noose her groom had  placed around her neck was made from the rope attached to an anchor, and it pulled her into the icy depths where she forgot all of her names, she forgot that she had ever been human.

When the dolphins at last found her and carried her back to the shore, she came to America. In the United States the broken hearted, uncommitted, and antisocial are hip. So here, she lived with an American man who was teaching her how to be alone in the company of others. He was teaching her to loose heart with a smile and a shrug.

But in September, she called me, crying, and she asked if she could stay a few days. I wanted to tell her yes. I wanted to say, “Of course, you’re like a sister to me.” But I couldn’t.
Shortly thereafter she returned to Greece. There were no goodbyes.
At some point I sent her an email remembering the time we stood together in the water at Coyote Point. Children were flying kites and the sun was warm. Standing there in the water with her, I felt as though I was wading in the same sea that brushed the mysterious shoreline of her heart.
Afterwards we lay in the sun and she told me about men she wanted to introduce me to and old friends left in exotic places. The scent of  grass and sunscreen and sweat, mingled with her voice, her pretty vision for me, her sad stories.
And of course there was, encapsulating it all, Eternity.

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.

The Orange Guide

Jonas jumped off the worn metal bench as soon as he saw the balloon catch flight. It was a warm breeze that opened its arms, smelling of salt and pink flowers that bloomed in a garden not far away. He had been on the bench for hours, watching toddlers wander through a desert of sand, infants in their strollers electrified by the world above, young mothers pushing swings and sharing weary smiles of happiness with their children.
He sat there waiting, needing inspiration of some kind, an inspiration to do something he could only fail to describe. But he waited, understanding his need. This was where he turned to in times when he grasped for something, and since he lacked the ability to understand what that something was, he came to the place where little creatures acted instead of thinking.
The park was a constant teacher. Crying, young laughter, the tinkling music of an ice cream cart, old tears that quickly turned into shrieks of delight. Those little legs and arms, they all moved without rationalization or intent, it was pure movement released from the invisible binds of causality.
He needed more of what they had, what he had lost along the way from infant to man. He was constantly stuck in his mind, a rotating wheel of four thoughts that shifted in color and shape. Four different thoughts but he understood them to be the same. To escape, he came to the wide-open lawn of soft grass, to the world of sand and slides and swings. He watched carefully, always open to the possibility of newness, of great teaching.
Over the course of an hour he kept a careful gaze on a short dark haired boy in a stripped shirt and tiny tan shorts. The child was barely a few feet tall, but his eyes were of an ancient stone, something created only once in a century. The eyes of the gods looked out from the body of that little boy, searching the greenery of the neighborhood park, looking up into the fluffy clouds of an otherwise clear day, at the other children in various moments of play.
The young boy held onto a nylon string from a tethered orange balloon. From the bench where Jonas sat, he had focused increasingly on the small pudgy hand of the boy that was smeared with chocolate stains. Jonas watched the hand of the child, willing that hand to open, to give him a guide to follow.
Jonas felt a breeze on his back and a slight rustling of his dark shaggy hair, momentarily his eyes diverted from the hand of the child and darted to the left, to nowhere in particular, they just darted away as his body was overcome by the feeling of the breeze.
When he looked back up, the youngster was looking at him. They held eye contact for just a second, and in that time, Jonas saw dark mountains and red trees and rivers that flowed with blue and white foam. He was called back from the vision when the child’s hand opened, releasing the string and the balloon on its leash.
The balloon drifted easily away from the boy, content now with a new task. Jonas gave a quick nod to the boy, knowing that a guide had been sent. He jumped from the bench and walked towards the sidewalk that delineated the park from the street.
The balloon drifted away from the playground and the screech of children skidding down warm metal slides and the watchful eyes of young mothers with bulges below their loose shirts. None of them could see the door open and follow quickly, both because of their physical limitations and the children they were tending, so it was only him that was free enough to move from the worn green bench, him that had not just the luxury of time and open eyes, but the ability to act when a god released its guide.
Jonas followed the balloon in its path down the green lawn, over the stairs and then down the sidewalk. They moved into the world swiftly, he with absolute devotion, absolute certainty that this was the path to walk, that he would be shown things that needed to be seen, that he would hear music and horns and conversations wanting to be heard.
He managed to keep up with it until the edge of the park. There along the street, late morning traffic was moving along at a lazy pace, the hot sun glaring down on windshields and the people that waited behind them for a green light. He looked briefly into a dark blue car, noticing a young woman at the wheel. He wondered where she was going, what she was thinking about behind tinted glasses and frosted lips.
When he looked back into the sky, realizing his deviation, he saw that the orange balloon had befallen the grasp of an old tree on the corner. Or maybe it was resting, he couldn’t tell. The balloon hung onto the very thin outer branches, as if awaiting another signal.
Jonas stared up at the orange guide, and while he did, he sang. His body was straight, his arms were at his sides, his head bent backwards keeping the balloon in his sight, watching attentively until it would be time to move again.
As the song progressed and his heart began to open, his arms started to sway. His head and upper body began to rock gently, the melody integrated with his muscles and he moved like he was the song. It was long, an old ballad his father used to sing every night as he walked the perimeter of their farm and locked all the gates. The old man had once said that his father had sung it as well, walking the same land, tending the same perimeter. And now, travelling through the generations, it was that song which had embedded itself in the heart of Jonas. It came to him in dreams. Came as he walked down sidewalks, when he needed to catch what his hands could not grasp.
Two young mothers pushing matching strollers approached him on the sidewalk. He knew where they were headed, going towards a god they would not recognize. He turned to them slowly as he felt them approach, he turned to them with a smile on his face, the lyrics still on his lips, his eyes overcome with emotion as he saw their moving bodies, the young skin of their cheeks and the infants watching the sky. His eyebrows were dancing as much as eyebrows could, his eyes, dancing as well. He directed the song to them, to the two young women walking towards a god they could not see.
“Solo mi amor.”
When he was a boy, listening to the love songs of his father, he had understood that lyrics were a vehicle for emotions that had no names. And so he looked at them, the two young mothers, letting the words carry his love towards these women who would perceive him as a stranger in the park. He was their fool, their lover, their servant.
The words were not important, they merely gave shape to something else, and he let that something else come from someplace deep inside, move up through his throat gathering conviction and strength, up into his mouth, gathering a bit of sentimentality that spun the notes slightly, adding a glossy sheen.
He sang it for them until they made eye contact, one smiled shyly and the other looked away quickly, diverting her eyes to the ground, a little embarrassed by his attention. He smiled with the song on his lips as they passed. Then he took a quick breath and turned his attention back up to the balloon, which was just beginning to catch a ride on a light orange-scented breeze.

The Fire Hydrant

“What has gotten into you Jonathan?”
It was the voice of his mother. He didn’t have to look up to see the deep lines of worry etched in her pink forehead, or the downturned pale lips that seemed to tremble while waiting for an answer that would never come. He could picture her hands on her hips, the gold band of her wedding ring glinting in the sun, her gray-blue eyes darting back and forth from the neighbor’s house to him, and then up once again, scanning the cul-de-sac for curious eyes and sneaky glances.
He lay on his stomach above the sidewalk, the cold cement had worked its way through his clothes, and now the cool hand acted like an anchor despite the wind of worry beginning to blow.
He let her sounds float over him, drifting away like a bad smell. And when it cleared, he took a deep breath and renewed his attention on the fire hydrant towering over him. He had been sprawled on the sidewalk in front of his mother’s house for nearly two hours, taking photo after photo of the worn yellow hydrant. After each click of the camera he saw something new, a spider web, a crack, a spot of rust. And as he looked, he went deeper and deeper, seeing variations in color he had not seen before. It kept going and going. He had walked out of the door just to take a simple picture, but the hydrant was a door, and the moment he looked at it, the world opened and he could not look away. There was more to see, so much more. He could feel the chains of earth calling, it was a voice he recognized.
“Jonathan?”
He had been in a frenzy over the past week, that’s what she called it. He would take photos throughout the family’s house until the camera’s battery died, then he would plug it into the wall and while it charged, eat like a voracious animal. After the meal he would crash on the nearest padded piece of furniture, the couch in the living room, the easy chair in the dining room, or in his bed if the family’s large German shepherd had not already claimed it. His mother had begun to worry about him. She had never seen him like this. He had always been a creative boy, painting and writing and making things out of clay, but he always did it in his spare time, after classes or on the weekend, not for hours and hours, letting his cycle of sleep revolve around the battery instead of the moon. Something had snapped or changed and she was not sure why or how, but it worried her. There didn’t seem to be anything else in his life, just photos, just the camera.
She stood next to him on the sidewalk in her slippers and bathrobe. She looked around nervously, wondering if the neighbors could see them through their curtains. She hoped not, there would be little she could do to prevent the rumors from starting.
“Do you hear me Jonathan? What has gotten into you? Laying on the sidewalk, out here in the cold for hours, what could be so interesting about the hydrant?” She looked at his subject with a critical eye. It was yellow, but with cracks on the sides and rust along the edges, but it was a hydrant, and if he had not been out here, she would have never given it more than a second of her time, she never had before.
“I’m worried about you.”
He did not look up. Now he was only vaguely aware of her presence beside him, and it came only from the dull nagging sensation pulling on his skin, making it just a little more difficult to work, just a little harder to find new angles and cobwebs and worlds. He would not respond, he knew words would do little to appease her. He knew it did look strange, he was strange, but he could not stop. There were doors, there were angles, there was eternity to capture.

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.

Questions of Blame

I traveled with my second family, all of us crowded into a small white car, on our way an unknown destination. Older Brother was there and Younger Brother as well, and Wise Father and Kind Mother, all of us together in the twilight of the small compartment. I sat between the two brothers in the back seat, alternating my attention between them, trying to make them look at each other, trying to make it so we would all truly talk together, but it was rare for their eyes to ever meet, even rarer for them talk directly to each other. The road outside was surrounded by long lines of thin trees that swayed lightly in the wind, and the night had a kind of gray quality that seemed somehow familiar.
I turned to Older Brother and addressed him, and since I could only think of serious subjects when I was near him, I spoke to him of destiny and of choice. He immediately responded and we mulled over the abstract qualities of these concepts while the road kept on going straight as an imaginary line and Wise Father listened carefully as he drove. I hoped he would say something but he only chuckled once in a while and leaned back his head to acknowledge a particular point. Older Brother looked under the covering of our mutual assumptions and I pushed when I felt that I had to, and I relented when I felt it was best.
When it seemed that I had talked to Older Brother for too long and I felt Younger Brother growing restless on my left, I turned to him and asked him about his own terrible experiences. He talked to me in measured words, and he had no concepts to summarize what he was saying, no abstract figurations to examine, so he simply told me what had happened, and how it happened, and, to some degree, how he felt as it was happening. He spoke of violent encounters and threats of death and painful marks that would never be erased and sudden moments of conversion when the world turned upside down and the heavy bars of the prison didn’t seem so heavy any more. I listened and asked questions when it seemed that he had skipped over an important moment, and when I asked a question, he would answer in as much detail as he could muster and then he would go on, and he would smile sideways, blowing air out of his nose in a kind of soundless laughter.
Suddenly, Kind Mother turned around from her post at the passenger’s seat and looked at me in the twilight. Her eyes were as sweet and gentle as ever, but there seemed to be a kind of heaviness in demeanor her as well, a heaviness that had never been there or, at the very least, I had never noticed it.
“I feel that you blame me for all that has happened. I feel, in the final accounting, you think that I was the one that caused it all. I hear it in your words. I hear it in the way you speak of thing.”
My own eyes opened wide in surprise since I had never thought these things, I had never blamed her for anything at all. But as soon as she had spoken, my mind started to form shapes around the words that were still hanging in the air between us, and the shapes reorganized my memories at breakneck speeds that I couldn’t follow, and suddenly my memories were no longer the same as they had been and Older Brother had changed form and Younger Brother had also changed form and Wise Father nodded as he usually did and the road kept on going straight through the gray darkness.
“I have never blamed you, not at all. I simply want to look at all the causes, at all the events, everything fits together and to place the cause in only one spot would be to make a great mistake. Causes are like roots, they extend from one event in all directions. Only fanatics grab on to one of the many roots and decide that that is the only one that matters.”
Her eyes closed and opened, and I might have seen a tiny tear rolling down her cheek but it was too dark inside the car for me to be sure. Younger Brother shifted around by my side. He wanted the ride to be over soon. Wise Father chuckled in that way that implied hidden knowledge and Older Brother shook his head. There was something that I had said that he was not pleased with, he might have even heard an insult in my words. It was through him that I had come to understand that insults are unavoidable once distrust has set in like a slowly growing cancer.
I tried to retrace my words, I tried to think of where it was that Kind Mother had found the evidence of blame, the implication that I was specifically blaming her. I couldn’t find the right spot, as much as I looked, as much as I examined. And then I remembered that our language was different, and that more than once someone had said that they couldn’t understand what Older Brother was saying to me, that they couldn’t understand what I was saying to Older Brother, that the words escaped them as if they were all being spoken in a strange unknown language. So maybe she just heard what she was afraid of hearing, and maybe because she was afraid of it, there was a kernel of truth in it. Not the entire truth, for the entire truth was too large to be held in any one thought, in any one sentence. But maybe a sliver of truth, enough of it to make her cry, enough of it to make my past into a different story from the one I had always framed as my experience. Maybe she had maintained a certain structure too long, maybe she had allowed certain imbalances to fester, to grow past the point when anything could be done about it.
Their faces were different now, but the road remained the same. Kind Mother had turned towards the windshield and was staring at the place where the road disappeared in the horizon. There always seemed to be a white cloud there, a bright white cloud that we never quite reached, and yet it always seemed so close.
Older Brother, with his new face and his new clothes, turned towards me once again and he said: “Each of us has to respond for our own actions. We can’t blame others for what we do.”
I nodded and agreed. There was no use asking who we would be responding to or why we were all so concerned with the placement of blame, why when I spoke of causes everyone thought I spoke of judgements and faults. Maybe we didn’t care so much where the blame rested as long as it wasn’t on us.
Younger Brother, with his new face and his new clothes, turned towards me and said: “You used to be my friend. You were my friend first before anything else.”
I nodded and agreed. There was no use asking how he had faded away from me or how I had faded away from him, how he had turned into a living memory that only danced in the distance. He was no longer the Younger Brother I knew and so I couldn’t touch on such delicate subjects. I could only listen and take in what he wanted to give me.
Kind Mother inhaled deeply and then released a deep sob. It was only then that I was certain she was crying. Wise Father turned to her and said: “Don’t worry, mama, we’ll be there very soon. Very soon this will all be a memory. “
I leaned back on the backseat and exhaled softly. It would certainly all be a memory and I now knew what ultimately happened with memories. In the horizon, the white cloud was shining bright, as distant as it ever was. Inside the car, there was only the very faint sound of crying and of soft, careful breathing. Soon this would all be a memory. And then everything would change. Just like it always did. Just like it always had.

Eban

Eban Greggs had scarcely ever been out of his one bedroom apartment which stood on the corner of Linden and Hoffmen Streets overlooking the cemetery. A woman named Galetta who lived downstairs from him did his shopping and dropped his clothing, mainly pajamas, off at the cleaners and picked them up again for him once a week. She was a big black woman with enormous breasts. She had three children that lived in her apartment with her, one of them was her brother’s son. Her very elderly and partially deaf auntie lived in the same two bedroom apartment with her. Eban had never been down to Galetta’s apartment. He had never met the deaf old auntie, or Galetta’s boy, Dillan or her youngest child, a girl called Ester, but he heard often about them all. Once or twice, the brother’s son, Josef, had come up and knocked on the door and said,
“My Auntie says I should come see if you want anything special. We’re going to Tanforan.”
Tanforan was the big mall nestled in the adjacent community of South San Francisco. Eban would thank him and say no, he was fine. When he needed something particular, he ordered it online and it was delivered to his doorstep by the postman who wore a huge yellow cowboy hat to accompany his big gray cookie duster. From time to time, the landlord came and fixed a leaky faucet, and once in a while Eban had to go down to the garage and get into his 1991 Toyota corolla and drive to San Francisco and meet with his publisher. These were all of the people that Eban personally knew.
He began work in the afternoons and could hear when Galleta’s children returned home from school. He worked through the night and the quiet hours when everyone slept and then he tapped not only into his own subconscious but into theirs, borrowing their dreams to fill his pages. It seemed to him that when the world slept it was prone to opening its secret soul to him, and often he opened his window and looked past the bars at the white moon and the lights glittering like jewels set in the city beyond and listened deeply to the cool quiet night.
With his ear, specially trained in these nightly exercises, he could almost hear the dreaming murmur of the 11 people that inhabited his building, and then reaching further, the 1672 people residing in addresses along Linden, and then the 6688 that lived in the neighborhood around him on Villa, Sylvan, Lisbon, and Abbott, and so on, slowly reaching outward with the tentacles of his mind until some dreamer’s fears and desires burst open to him like a split pomegranate at last revealing the many secret crimson chambers that were guarded in the waking hours. Then he would return to the artificial glow of his liquid crystal monitor and his fingers would rattle desperately over the keys to keep up with the story’s unfolding.
In the watercolor wash of dark gray just before the sun rose behind the San Bruno Mountains and lightened the fog drenched world to a white wash, he would hear the sound of the shower running in the unit next door, and then foot steps throughout the building and the opening and closing of three different front doors, and engines starting in the cars in the garage, and the creak and clang of the iron garage gate, and at last the pounding of the feet of Galetta’s little mob as they ran down the flight of stairs beneath him on their way out to school. He would then close the blinds tight and crawl into bed.
In the summer, it was a challenge for Eban to work as he was accustomed to because the children, not just Galleta’s but all the children that lived in the neighborhood, were home from school. The days were noisier and the nights were shorter and plagued with loud music, laughter, and screaming. People slept less during the summer and the window of time during which Eban could dip into their dreams and skim out stories was narrower.
One evening at around 7:00 Eban was startled by a terrible uproar coming from the apartment below him. He could hear Galleta’s rich voice which usually boomed with authority as she scolded her children, or trembled with laughter while she loudly repeated some gossip to Auntie. Now it was rising to a high and panicked pitch, the likes of which he had never heard coming from her before. He stopped and listened and could hear that voice joined by the others of the household, all calling,
“Esther! Esther!”
They traveled from the garage to the apartment to the garage again and then out into the street. Then he heard Galleta’s heavy footsteps pounding up the stairs and abruptly she began rapping on his door. Alarmed and bewildered Eban hurried and cast it open to find her there with a tear streaked face and heaving bosom, ringing her hands.
“My baby! I can’t find my Esther. She was riding her bike in the garage and she’s gone. The boys left the gate open and went across the street and left her alone and she’s gone. I told them! I told them not do that and they did it again and now she’s gone!”
She was sobbing now, and Eban, in his pajamas and slippers, impulsively pressed by her to get out the door and down the stairs.
“Call the police!” he called over his shoulder as he thundered down the stairs, the first flight, then the second where he saw the frail old auntie trembling in the doorway and out of the garage where he noted the little pink and white bike lay on its side and into the street where a small mob of neighborhood kids had gathered with Galetta’s boys.
“I saw her walking that way!” said a round faced little Mexican boy pointing towards the cemetery and down Hoffman.
Eban ran that way, his heart racing. He reached out into the world as he did at the window at night searching for the little murmur that to him was Esther. He turned down Villa and stopped at the corner apartment. He then walked to the next one, a blue rectangular building, and pushed on the front gate. By chance it had not been properly closed and yielded to him so that he found himself passing the gold mailboxes in the wall and mounting the first flight of stairs. Eban hesitated, knocked on the door, and doubted himself. After a moment a lean white woman in a baggy T-shirt opened the door, two little girls clinging to her and peering around her legs at him.
He knew instantly he was wrong, that they could not help him, but he said,
“My neighbor’s little girl is missing. A little black girl.”
“Oh my God!” the woman gasped, covering her mouth with her hand. “From where? Which building?”
“658 Linden. If you see her…” he trailed off trying to hold onto the murmur. The woman was nodding. He disengaged abruptly, walked swiftly down the hall to the next door and this time, when he reached out with his hand out to knock, he grabbed the doorknob instead, a mad thing to do, and turned it and opened the door.
There she was, sitting on an old couch patterned with flowers the color of rust, drinking coke out of a glass with red roses painted upon it in lines of three. In an avocado colored easy chair, a little old Filipino man sat sinking into the cushions. The top of his head was bald and encircled by a ring of soft thin white and gray hair.
“Esther?” Eban asked.
The child smiled and said,
“How did you know my name?”
“I’m your neighbor Eban Gregg. Your mother’s looking for you. She’s very upset.”
“She’s real mad?” Esther asked.
“She’s scared.” Eban told her.
“I’m okay.” She said, “This is Mr. Juan. He forgets things.” She set her glass on a coaster on the table and standing up, skipped over to the old man.
“He has this bracelet, see?” she said, fingering a silver bracelet on the old man’s wrist. “Auntie has one but she doesn’t wear it. It has his name and address on it, like a puppy.” She giggled. The old man nodded at her and smiled and nodded and smiled rather absently at Eban.
“He was lost and he was crying so I helped him.” Esther said
“Who was crying?” the old man asked coming out of his reverie. He seemed genuinely curious.
“You were!” Esther exclaimed.
“Oh, well.” the old man smiled and shrugged and sunk back into his cushions.
“I better take you back to your mother.” Eban said
“Okay.” Esther said. “Bye Mr. Juan.”
“Bye, Bye.” He smiled and shut his eyes.
Esther came and took Eban’s hand, surprising him. It felt awkward and frightened him a little, like being close to a small exotic animal such as a squirrel or a chinchilla.
They passed over the threshold and Eban closed the door behind them.
“How come you’re wearing your pajamas?” she asked.

The Lion's Face

His name was Tad which was short for Thaddeus. Thaddeus was his father’s name. He was sixteen years old and unusually tall and lean. His hair was the color of straw and tended to be a mess. No one had ever taught him a way of combing it and he had cut it himself just to keep it out of his eyes since he was six years old. That was after his mother had run away to California.
He sometimes got a postcard or letter from her. He had received three to be exact, two postcards and one letter in the ten years since her departure. Her name was Helen. She had married Thaddeus Sr. when she was only fifteen. She ran away to be with a traveling vacuum salesman and get away from the town of Bethlehem where she had lived her whole life up till then.
Tad was in the high school marching band. When he wore his white uniform and bright red cap he resembled a matchstick. He played trombone. That was until the day that Pauly, Cash, and Steve pried the case out of his hands after school. Pauly was the shortest, with a mean square jaw and a buzz cut. What he lacked in height he made up for with pure aggression. He was the ring leader. Cash was the lumbering giant. Big and dumb with a perpetually bruised eye. At home he was the punching bag, but at school he did all the punching. Steve was of average build, not too lean and not too hefty, neither short nor tall. He wore a leather jacket and sold ecstasy, acid, and reefer to other kids, all of which he obtained from his older brother Stan. While Pauly was the brains, and Cash the muscle, Steve just struggled to keep up and laughed no matter what was happening, encouraging the other two with his enthusiasm.
Tad tailed after them begging to get his trombone back. Whenever he got close enough to make a grab for it, Cash just gave him a rough shove back while Pauly continued mixing insults and abuses with the occasional taunt and Steve trailed behind the other three, doubling over with laughter now and then when the abuses were particularly amusing. In this way, they paraded all the way down to the river where Pauly flung open the case, made a few more quips, and dumped the instrument into the brown water. Now Tad made his greatest effort to reach the trombone, but Cash threw him down on the muddy bank and pressed his cheek into the wet earth. Pauly kneeled and tilted his head to face his victim.
“What’s the matter? I’m doin’ you a favor. Your never gonna get any girls if you spend all your time fiddling with your trombone.” Steve erupted into a fresh burst of chortles and flopped down onto his rear trying to catch his breath.
“Yeah.” Pauly said, “Have you heard from your mom lately?’
When Tad’s answer was to try and struggle with Cash, Pauly continued, “Aw. That’s too bad. She stopped by my place last night.”
And so it went until the trombone was long gone and Tad’s uniform was soaked and stained with mud. Cash then let go of him and the three tormentors strolled away. Tad lay in the muck waiting for their voices to fade into the distance. Laying there studying the mud he noticed something shiny protruding about two feet from his face. He reached out with his hand and plucked it was of the moist grime and brushed its surface clean with his fingertips. At first he thought it was a coin, but then he noticed that it had a loop to run a chain through. There was a lion engraved on one surface, and on the back, “For my Katie.” was inscribed in a flowery script. Tad clutched the amulet in his hand and stood up. He spent the evening searching the banks down stream for his trombone but all he found was the case.

Tad could not tell his father about the trombone since it had cost a great deal of money. Neither could he bear to explain the manner in which it had been lost. In the weeks following the event, he carried the empty trombone case away from the house to keep up appearances. He often didn’t make it to the school at all. Instead he strolled along the river bed, musing over his treasure, wondering who Katie was, imagining that he might meet her one day, looking for her medallion among the reeds. He imagined she would be so pleased that he had found it, that they would agree it was fate that had brought them together. Katie might have long brown hair and green eyes. She might be someone from the school that he had never seen before, or somebody’s cousin just visiting, or even an older woman, a college student come home to care for ailing parents. They would fall in love and she would beg him to come with her, away from Bethlehem to New York, or California, or wherever she went to school.
Soon he no longer debated whether he should go to school or take another walk. The river seemed to be calling him, Katie was waiting for him. Each day, he left the house a little earlier and he came home a little later.
He wandered farther afield than he had ever gone as a boy, following the river upstream, under bridges, through pastures. Breathing the fresh air, stretching his legs, examining the amulet, he dreamed up pleasant conversations with Katie, picnics and swimming in the river, first kisses and second kisses and more and more and more.
On one particular Friday afternoon, he passed the point at which he usually turned back home. His father would go to the bar after work and he would be home late. Tad would be home late too. He pressed on and caught sight of a distant orchard. The sun was poised in the center of a blue sky beaming warmth down on his straw colored hair. He whistled and ate a sandwich and drank a root beer he had packed. On the opposite bank he caught sight of the ruins of a burned out house. The whole bank surrounding it was charred black. The remains of a few trees jutted up out of the ground mournfully. Tad put away the uneaten remains of his sandwich. He stripped off his shirt, socks and shoes and put them in his backpack. The medallion, which he wore on a bit of twine around his neck, gleamed in the noonday sun. He sat the back pack down in the grass out of the river’s reach and waded in. The cool water felt good after a morning of walking. The current was gentle and he waded until he had to swim and soon, he made it to the opposite bank.
He approached the charred ruins carefully, watching for broken glass or anything that might injure his bare feet. There was very little to see. A wall stood with a bit of sooty wallpaper still intact. He had almost satisfied his curiosity and made up his mind to swim back when he noticed something glittering beneath a mound of ash. Walking on the balls of his feet he approached gingerly and brushed away the soot. He caught his breath. It was a lion’s face, like the one on Katie’s medallion, gazing at him from the lid of a pewter jewelry box. The box lay open, it’s hinges fully extended. He lifted it, but there was nothing underneath. His hand drifted to the amulet at his throat.

Saturday morning, Tad mowed the lawn for his father. Thaddeus Sr. sat under the shade of the porch drinking bottles of cool beer one by one. When the lawn was finished, Tad left his father dozing on the porch and stormed the garage. Every Sunday for the last three years the Nors County Tribune had been left on the porch. Tad’s father read the funnies and the sports section and then deposited the paper in the garage to be recycled someday. There, in the stuffy darkness of the dusty garage, the young man searched around for the most recent papers, carefully reading dates and arranging a stack that spanned over the last 12 Sundays. Then he retired with them to his own room and began a systematic search starting with last Sunday’s paper. In the third paper, he found what he was looking for. A fire in east Nors county had killed 82 year old Kathleen Sims in her home. She had no children to survive her. Her ex-husband Ralph Sims still lived in Florida with his second wife.

On Sunday, Tad walked the length of the river only as far as Old Pete’s bridge. He stood in its center, watching the water rush by, disappearing under his feet. He remembered that his mother had brought him here to Play Pooh sticks when he was small. It was a game she picked up from an old children’s movie which she played for him every morning while she did the housekeeping. The game involved each player dropping a stick into the water at one side of the bridge and then rushing to the other side to see whose stick came out in the lead. She’d had to hold him up so that he could drop his stick over the side at the same time that she dropped hers. Then she would rush with him in her arms so that they could see whose stick had won the race.
He thought about his Katie, the way he had imagined her, and of the picture of the wrinkled little woman from the newspaper photograph. If they had met while she was alive, she might have baked him cookies and he would have done her yard work. If he had been born 66 years sooner, then maybe she would have been his green eyed black haired Katie. She would have married him instead of Ralph Sims and they would have died together in the fire. He turned the lion faced amulet in his fingers and watched the sunlight reflect from its golden surface. He heard them coming long before he looked up to face them. They were practically on top of him before he acknowledged them with a glance.
“Where you been Tad?” Pauly sneered. “Haven’t seen you around school lately. You been here looking for your trombone this whole time?” Steve snickered.
Pauly caught sight of the amulet pressed between Tads thumb and forefinger, “What’s that? Was it your whore Mommy’s? You missing your Mommy Tady wad?”
Pauly’s hand darted out to snatch the amulet but Tad was a hair quicker, jerking his own hand out of reach. In an instant, Cash was behind Tad pinning his arms behind his back.
“Throw this moron into the river.” Pauly laughed at his own suggestion because Steve was too occupied with slumping against the railing as if he were falling asleep.
Tad struggled while Cash endeavored to heave him over the rail. He wiggled and kicked and his head was slammed against the rail just as the bigger boy managed to flop him over the side. Katie’s medallion fell ahead of him glistening in the sun as it went. It hit the water just seconds before Tad’s inert body came crashing down over it, forcing it down to the river bed escorted by tiny green bubbles. Cash and Pauly hung over the rail waiting for Tad to resurface so they could throw in a few more abuses. When he did, he was face down in the water and completely motionless, drifting slowly downstream.
“Shit.” Pauly said after a few moments of stunned silence. “Shit! You banged his head on the rail!”
“I didn’t do nothin’,” Cash protested.
“Fuck.” Pauly said. “Fuck. I think you killed him.”
“I did what you told me to do.” Cash puffed out his pudgy chest.
“Oh shit.” Pauly said looking around to see if they had been observed. “C’mon, lets go.” He didn’t have to tell Cash twice, but Steve didn’t move.
“Steve,” Pauly said, “C’mon, we’re going!” He pulled on the leather jacket but Steve was out cold now, sitting with his back propped up against the rail and his mouth draped open. Pauly pulled him until he fell over on his side and murmured something indistinct.
“Whatever. Forget him. Let’s go,” Pauly commanded and he and Cash hurried away with shoulders hunched.
Katie’s amulet followed Tad’s dead body downstream for a while until he drifted up onto the bank not far from where they’d met. Then it kept going on it’s own, carried along by the current, until the lions face was once again shining in the sun, miles away from the town of Bethlehem.

Little Bird

There was no reason in the world for the little bird to light down upon my windowsill. It held in its beak two little twigs , branches from an olive tree I think, or it could have been apricot, honestly I know nothing about trees.
My grandfather had an orchard and I spent summers there, but goodness knows I never did anything but lay around under the trees reading penny novels about cowboys and Indians that I had found down in the musty old cellar under grandpa’s dusty wooden house. I remember eating the fruits from the trees of the orchard.
One season in particular, came a crop of very sweet fruits. Apples, pears, and other delicacies sprang from the trees. The reds and greens were so rich and they may have been an indication of their sweetness.
I don’t know what made them so sweet, maybe it was the extra rain, maybe it was the wind from the north, who knows. I just remember eating the sweet fruit under the trees in the orchard. My lips touching their skins with anticipation for each bite. I often wondered if the birds noticed how sweet the fruits were too. Perhaps they just pecked at the fruits with their tiny beaks and never truly tasted them at all. Perhaps they were able to taste them and perhaps they did notice the extra sweetness this season.
Maybe they were wondering if the farmer put something special in the soil this season to make them so sweet. Maybe it was poison. Yes, perhaps that was it, maybe the farmer didn’t like the birds and was trying to poison them all. Would poison taste sweet though? Maybe it would taste sweet to trick you into thinking it wasn’t poison. If it were poison, then there would be no birds to wonder about the sweetness of the fruits, so that couldn’t be it.
Maybe the sweetness came from the rain. The clouds drifting by some strange cities gathering strange molecules to make sweet rain. Maybe clouds really do taste like cotton candy as I have long suspected. That may be what made the rain sweet.
Or it might be that it was something in the soil. The cows were eating a lot of Twinkies and their shit made the soil sweet, which in turn made the fruit so sweet.
Why those birds sat on my windowsill with those twigs is still a mystery to me though. Were they trying to tell me something?
Maybe I am making too much of all of this and they were just en route to their nests with some nesting material in their little beaks and needed to stop and rest. My windowsill was the perfect spot for them. The dark green paint was flaking off the wood of the sills but it was still a nice place to stop and relax.
Bugs sometimes came and rested on the sill too. Big giant bugs in the summer time. Those yucky green ones that you fear will get stuck in your hair. Japanese beetles I think they are called. June bugs are even bigger and yuckier. I had one of those stuck in my hair once. It was terrible. Every little girl’s nightmare.
Wait…Maybe bats would be worse. A bat stuck in your hair would definitely be worse. I can imagine them flopping around helplessly in my tangled hair, gasping for their tiny lives just as freaked out as I am. Maybe bats have terrible, scary nightmares about getting stuck in a little girls hair. Never being able to fly free ever again. They would rather be flying around using their radar to catch tiny, bug morsels from the air. Being stuck in a little girls messy, long hair definitely would be their worst nightmare.
When I was little, we used to play in the field until dusk. We would see bats fluttering about seemingly aimless. We would take small pieces of gravel and throw them in the air as high as we could and watch the bats dive for them thinking they were tender bugs to snack on. The stone would come crashing down, barely missing one of my siblings and we would laugh and laugh, rolling in the grass teasing each other about the near miss. Those bats DID know what they were doing after all. They could not be fooled by the small stone, they somehow knew it wasn’t an insect. How they knew was beyond me. Aren’t they blind? Later in the week, when my dad would take out the tractor to mow the field, he would be very angry to find all of those pieces of gravel. We hid in ours rooms to avoid the scolding. But later the next week, when the bats came out again, we would do it again!
I never did get a bat stuck in my hair. I think they are too smart to fly in a little girl’s hair, actually. They want bugs and fruit. That’s it! Maybe the bats did something to make the fruit extra sweet that year! They are probably much smarter than we give them credit for. Maybe the bats and those birds on my windowsill were conspiring together. Maybe they were building something monumental. They may have a whole bunch of buildings that we know nothing about where they harvest the sweet fruit and sell it on the black market. And maybe that’s the secret the little bird was trying to divulge. If it was, then it went right past me, just like those summer days when I would lay under trees, reading penny novels and eating sweet, sweet fruit. Gone before I even noticed.

Gifts From Faraway Places

Her face turned an angry red when she learned the market was out of rice. She had tried several shops in the neighborhood and no one knew when there’d be more. Her face was hot, her chest heaved as she took intentionally slow steps and long, extended breaths. Her limbs vibrated softy, it was an almost imperceptible shaking to anyone watching, but it affected her speech and walk in subtle ways, and in recent months, she had begun to move slower in an effort to disguise her constant state of fear.
It was almost a year ago since the first bomb was dropped; it was that day, while the night was heavy with the heat of August, that she became familiar with the sensation of panic. Terror traveled through her open window, wrapping itself around her like the thick arms of a possessive lover. That night became a stain in her memory, its edges dark and black, leading to the open well of wounds which tunneled deeper each passing day.
Before that horrible day in August, she had led a modest life. She was raised by deeply religious parents who sheltered her from the influences of the world. She spent her childhood confined to her home and small family garden, her mother taught her to cook, (so one day she could please her husband) and her grandmother showed her art of embroidery (so she could decorate the clothing of her children). Now, she was the young mother of an infant son and the obedient wife of a much older man. She had been introduced to her husband by an aunt during a New Year’s celebration, and after a short courtship of shy hand holding and quiet conversations, they were married. Before the one-year anniversary of their marriage, the bombs began to fall.
Now, she looked back with nostalgia, recalling the naivete of her former self, nearly unaware of the global politics that would lead to the reality shattering destruction, the ever present booms and human cries which would soon become a daily occurrence. Her husband had watched the news each night, but he rarely spoke of politics with her, he rarely spoke at all, and even though she spent most of her time in the house and the small courtyard outside, she never turned on the TV. She preferred talking with her neighbors, whose windows opened into her bright courtyard. Her small garden was full of sweet smelling flowers and overflowing with the mint she used to prepare tea. During the day, she loved sitting on the small bench made for two, letting her bones rest beneath the young tree that had begun to bear sweet fruit. In the warmth of the ever present sun, she relished the luxury of resting in the sunshine and filling the small square space of the garden with female laughter and gossip.
When the first bomb struck the earth, only a mile from her house, she was awoken from the sweetest of dreams. Even today, she could not recall the details, but she remembered smiling, remembered the feeling of lightness and air. As she was jolted awake by sirens and the sound of splintering metal, she felt the softness drain from her consciousness. Before her brain could catch up to her movements, she was already running for her son. After gathering the crying infant in her arms, she ran for her husband to ask what was happening. "The Americans" was his only reply, and then he left them to turn on the TV. She spent the rest of the long, black night alone in bed, trying to console her crying son and failing once again with the sound of a new explosion. His cries lasted through the night, never ceasing, never slowing, as if he already knew what was coming. As dawn broke, the sounds of explosions continued.
She thought of the "Americans." A vague place and people. She had had a Mickey Mouse toy once, she had seen pictures of the Statue of Liberty in a book, she could recognize the American flag and her grandfather had bought her a hamburger once, despite the objections of her strict father. Once, while shopping with her sister-in-law, they had passed an electronics shop, and she had glimpsed a TV show with people in red bathing suits running along a beach. She had never known an American. She had been raised by very strict parents, they were conservative in every sense: dress, religion, politics, manners. "Western," was a word her father used with disgust. He said it often and she feared its implications. She didn’t know exactly what it meant, but she knew it was bad and she knew she would never want to be called "western." In the darkness of that first night, she wondered what her country had done. She knew nothing of the world, and for the first time, she wondered if that was a problem. What lay beyond the boundaries of her immediate community was as foreign to her as the strange faraway country which now dropped bombs upon her land.
The days passed with more reports of bombings, and with them, her fears multiplied. After a couple weeks into the conflict, her husband returned from work to tell her he had been fired. He said his job had been "dissolved," which was the official term his boss used. She watched TV with him and saw the images of destruction mounting. Burning oil fields, decimated bridges and hospitals. She saw the crumbled remains of their water plants, the hiding place of women and children that had been bombed accidentally. The shocking images of bodies left to rot on the road filled her with dread. How long would she remain among the living? The fireworks continued each day and night. All her friend’s husbands were out of work too, the faces of the women with whom she had once chatted so happily not so long ago, all their faces were now dark with worry. The neighborhood now lived in a state of constant worry, teetering on the edge of hunger, thirst and desperation. With each visit to the market, she noticed the price of rice and milk steadily rising. Soon, she thought, they would not be able to afford the basics needed to survive…thousands of black thoughts clouded her mind.
Her husband announced he was leaving to join the resistance against "the Americans." As she sobbed, he told her she would move in with his brother and his family, which was only a couple blocks away. Although her husband seldom talked, through her tears, she could see the regret in his eyes; but she could sense his courage, his need to act. He told her there was no option. There was no work, there was no money. Without action, there would be no future for his son, he said. Soon, he lamented, there would not even be any food…the Americans had to be stopped. "I cannot just watch my brothers dying, I must move." He held her all night as she cried. And at dawn, as the sun broke over the horizon, as strong and as a fiery as a bullet, he took them to his brother’s house and said goodbye.

A Melody From Lost Days

The old man walked down the cement steps slowly, holding onto the metal rail with his right hand while he held the violin case with his left. As he leaned forward, the sunlight fell invisibly upon his short black hair, which showed long streaks of white and little spots of naked pink scalp in the strong clear light. One step at a time he moved, breathing slowly, while small groups of people walked past him in a rush. A Latin couple holding hands and talking in soft whispers, their heads almost touching. A proud middle aged man, his head up high and pulled backwards, examining the plaza as if it was his private kingdom, and his two beautiful brunette daughters in smooth elegant dresses, the thin fabric subtly tracing the outlines of their soft thin bodies. A group of three middle aged women talking loudly about the sunny weather in voices that echoed through the small trees, words that attempted to hide too many afternoons passed away in restless boredom and troubled vague angst.
The old man would nod slowly at each stranger that passed by him, whether they acknowledged it or not, and then he would continue moving at his own slow pace. He stepped down onto the light brown dirt path that led to the dry fountain and he moved a bit faster on the flat surface, carefully looking forward with slim, tired eyes. He came to an empty green bench, next to the short baby trees that were not tall enough or full enough to offer shade from the sun, and there he sat down, nodding his head back and forth in a simple affirmation of his actions. Placing the violin case on the bench next to him, he leaned back and took a few deep breaths with his eyes closed, his brow furrowed in a sincere effort at concentration. The sound of kids playing came from the direction of the fountain. The sound of cars honking came from the direction of the museum. The sound of birds singing came from the short little dry trees all around the path. After a few moments of darkness and deep inhalations, he opened his eyes again and he looked all around him, his eyes blinking at the light as if he had just woken up from a long sleep. Then he stretched his arms and took hold of the violin case.
He opened it carefully, unfastening one lock at a time. Very slowly and methodically, he took out the Gao-Hu, the traditional Chinese violin that his father had given him on a sunny afternoon much like this one, many years ago. He looked at it for a moment, examining its short, fat cylindrical body, its long thin neck, the two taut strings and the two large tuning knobs, all carefully polished, as shiny as the day he had first laid eyes on its delicate curved shapes. He leaned back once again, opened his legs and placed the instrument between them. Then he pulled out the bow and ran it softly across the strings. A thin ghostly sound emerged that echoed over the noisy plaza, trailing away into the distance to become intertwined with bird song. Two older women turned over to look at him. They were sitting on a bench much like the one he was sitting on, but closer to the dry fountain. Their attention held on him for a moment and then it faded and they returned to their conversation. The old man rearranged himself on the wooden bench. He propped up the violin case and left it open, in case someone wanted to pay him for his effort. Then he turned his eyes back towards the violin itself.
He allowed the sounds of the kids playing in the fountain to drift into him, like cool water sliding into a finely crafted vase. The laughter, the screams, the calls, they all resonated within him, and he could almost be a little boy once again, a little boy that could now hear his father calling, asking him to come and play the violin while he ran away into the woods, ‘no, no violin today. I want the creek. I want the forest. I want to run. No violin. No.’ And the kids screamed louder and their screams rang through the plaza and then he pressed the bow onto the strings, and he pressed the strings with his left hand. He closed his eyes once more and then ran the bow over the strings in a single decisive move, and the sound was now loud and present and full, resonating through the plaza with the confident beauty of folk tales and mythic legends, and the sound of running laughing children was like a tinkling counterpoint to the lilting melody that sprang from his hands, growing from a faint whisper to a soaring musical statement and then back again. Up and up, sliding into a higher octave that bounced off the sunlight like electrical explosions over a charged metal plate, he pulled his head back and the light fell on his closed eyes and it was as if the music had flared into fire and the fire was all over his skin and it ran like little incandescent rivers over the trees and up to the sky and the melody was slow and stately and sad and it was all coming from him, through him and around him. In the midst of clear resonant ecstasy and lost conversations that mingled like frenzied ostinatos under the vibrant power of the simple song, only he could remember. Only he knew that it was the same sad melody his father had played, back when time went on forever and no danger could stop a little boy from running into dark waters or jumping over dark holes in the ground. Only he knew that it was the same melody he never learned when he had his father for a teacher, and that he now learned when he only had himself in a cold land of ghosts.
He opened his eyes as the melody came sliding down to its original register. The ladies across the path were looking at him once again, smiling. He had made some mistakes, he knew the melody wasn’t perfect, not yet, it wasn’t quite the same melody that he remembered, but he was getting closer, a little closer every day. He nodded at the ladies as he played the final low note, making the strings rumble with grounded finality. He pulled the bow away from the strings and took a very deep breath. Two men in thick leather jackets walked by talking of finances. He looked up at them but their faces were turned away, not even interested enough to purposefully ignore him. He looked back towards the stairway and saw a teenage girl in a light brown summer dress walking by slowly, her half closed eyes turned towards the thin clouds and their clear blue background. Then he looked back at the two ladies and smiled and nodded.
He leaned backwards and pressed the bow to the strings. He heard the first strains of the little melody roaming through him once again, like the fingers of his father’s hand petting his little head, like his father’s voice telling him about the future, about countries far away where things would be better, about dreams, about disappointment and about sadness. He closed his eyes and slid into the melody with renewed commitment, with a sense of rediscovered passion, letting the notes take him far away, to a place that had no beginning and no purpose, a place where death was an illusion and loneliness was just a drink of cool water from a gentle lagoon in the middle of a meadow. The melody stretched and soared, bursting from his old wrinkled fingers like a flock of pigeons seeking the emptiness of the open sky. It was almost there. Maybe this time he would get it right. If not today, then tomorrow. Soon enough, the true melody, the one he remembered in dreams and hummed while he walked in the morning, the one that made his heart shiver like crystal tears about to shatter, that melody would come out from the old violin, soon it would live again and it would fill this sun soaked plaza in the middle of a noisy urban park, and it would touch it with the same gentle colors of melancholic hope that had once washed over that little wooden cabin, peaceful and delicate, sitting quietly by the side of the forest.

Playing at the Borders

In the kitchen they sit around the table, all different shapes and sizes. This one is lean and pretty with a cruel little mouth and matching dark eyes set in a bronze face, another is round and white with a plain face void of any make up, a simple face that reveals a sweet disposition, this other one is short with kinky hair and a perpetually sour look on her clean face, and here is another with springy hair and eyes that are on the verge of snapping shut with fatigue. She is a composite of them all, oscillating between their extremes, unable to be completely cruel, incapable of being wholly jolly, with curls and make up, neither thin nor thick. At the head of the table sits the mother, unlike any of them now that age has overtaken her. With her short haircut and spectacles, her casual pants and striped sweater, she could be the mother of any one of them, or of none of them at all. The sisters sit at the table, and so does the sister in law, bouncing a baby in her lap. The brothers come and go, two of them. One is the master of the house, the father of the little baby bouncing at the table. He has a mustache and a weathered air about him. He looks as if he has stepped out of another era, an era when men were stronger, harsher, almost made of stone. The other is bigger and has a more modern look, he wears a hooded sweatshirt, and he can speak as easily in English as in Spanish. A son in law hovers behind the mother, rubbing her shoulders, drinking and joking.
In the living room, the old uncle sits in a chair wearing his brown hat and a red tropical shirt. He tells the story of his retirement to two women, friends of one of the sisters, one is a painted and bejeweled Latina, the other is the only "Gringa" in the whole bunch. His white whiskered face is tanned and his huge belly heaves as he explains that he left San Francisco, out of boredom after his retirement, and he moved to Florida so he could work again without loosing his pension. After seven years of listening to his wife complain about that land, so similar in climate to their home country of Nicaragua, they returned to San Francisco to find that their old house was now worth a million dollars and far from their financial reach. So they live now in Sacramento, economically exiled from the beautiful windy city, permanently aware of the consequences of a whimsical decision. He tells the story of his years of reckless drinking, and of his mother’s collapse in the middle of the street, which led him to set the bottle down on top of the television set and vow never to touch the stuff again. Then he stands to teach the blonde haired gringa how to salsa.
"March!" he tells her, "Forward… and now back."
They put a cake with a little candle set in its center, shaped like the numeral eight, on a high round table. Everyone comes round. A boy sits on a tall stool in front of the cake and his brothers crowd around him, placing gentle hands on one another’s shoulders. For a moment, in the random course of events, they stand in a line from eldest to youngest. Then the room is filled with song and the candle is extinguished with a soft swoosh of warm breath. The birthday boy’s face is pushed into the cake, leaving his nose and cheeks covered in blue frosting. His brother, the second to the eldest, comes to his aid and wipes his face with a towel as carefully and lovingly as an old kind mother. The cake is cut and the children leave theirs lying about, because they dislike the fruit in the center.
The sun has gone and the light is fading. The children run in a long howling line around the outer perimeter of the house. In the back, there is a built-in swimming pool filled with dirt and weeds instead of water. The concrete around the house is cracked and uneven, moved by decades of seismic activity. Behind the house, there are a series of smaller cottages and sheds, white paint peeling from the wooden boards, rusty old nails sticking out of old forgotten corners. The children keep on playing, running, jumping, screaming, laughing. Dangerous possibilities abound. Plenty of opportunities for a terrible accident. The neighbor’s houses are far off across fields that have lost their golden color under the pale sheen of the moon. The few gates which might confine or protect the children have been thrown open through the course of their raucous parading. They make their way up a long dark street, seeing phantoms in the shadows of every shrub. The very eldest of their party permits himself to tremble a little, and the very youngest pulls herself to her full height and presses on bravely so that they are all one, unified in their quest to touch the unknown.
Inside, the house is brightly lit and the music plays loud and lively. The tiniest children, the babies, ride around over the hard honey colored floor on tricycles, crashing into the legs of the adults, happy to hear them curse. The old Mother dances now with the two friends of her daughter, the Gringa and the painted Latina. The three face each other forming a soft triangle which pulses like a beating heart as they move into the center and then back out. As a unit, they rotate 30 degrees and then back, always suggesting with this motion that they will turn in a complete circle, but never quite fulfilling that suggestion. They shuffle in and out, wiggling their hips, and keeping their wrists limp, subtly invoking a thousand years of hidden sacred dancing.
The windows of the house are small, holding the dark night at bay, framing its deep purple color in little squares of yellow, beige and white. From beyond the little windows, comes the laughter of the running children, still together, still playing at the edge of the known world.