Struggles With Mother

She has always wanted me to be different, I understand that more clearly now. I didn’t have the words long ago to describe the repeating pattern, the predictable questions and requests sewn together like a simple quilt of three colors that followed me at first, then absorbed silently into my skin, tempering me with its weight and threads. 
I see it now from a slightly objective angle, my eyes just barely reaching above the gray fog and swirling shapes, the unsaid yet clearly defined goals that propelled me to a university and into the angst that would endure for decades, a sort of uneasy darkness that was just under the skin and could ooze out, thick and black if scratched just slightly. 
I didn’t understand it then, could not see the words making up the sentences that rolled through her head like a conveyor belt, getting more and more worn and rusty, but rotating nonetheless. As a baby girl she must have looked at me with all the hope and wonder in the world, projecting onto the blank screen of my white naked body all she saw as right and just, all perhaps that she had done and enjoyed and wished to repeat, all that she had not done but hoped to do through my skin and eyes.
As a young woman, both headstrong and naïve, I pushed against what I thought were inequalities, the mores of American society that everyone I knew seemed to accept and go along with, nearly universally without question.
She tried to keep me as a girl for as long as she could, even when my breasts started to bud and poke out from smooth cotton t-shirts.  She would not let me shave, and then when I did on my own, without consent, she looked at me sadly, finally relenting to the unstoppable flow of womanhood and said, ‘now you can never stop.’ 
Five years later, a head full of simple feminist ideology, unanswered questions and a body and mind full of open, bursting wonder and tinged with a splash of vehement anger, I stopped.  There was a contradiction I could not reconcile…I could not quite understand why when I looked at a man’s leg, covered in hair, why was I not repulsed?  Why did I have the opposite reaction seeing a slightly smaller leg, one of a woman, covered in hair? I decided it must be the culture, it must be a shared, accepted concept of beauty without anything behind it but current fashion and taste.
She did not see the young girl struggling to find her place in the symbolic order. She did not see the exploration, the push and thought against culture and the play with body and definition and experimentation with beauty and expectations, the transgression of a young girl in a society that demonized questions and moving against the wind. 
Then, as now, she could only see me through the eyes of others. She wondered and worried about how she would be defined and judged, how she would be one of the mothers that failed, who had not properly created and raised a young woman ready to join society beyond the safety of four walls. It was she who was the voice of society, she who demonized me, who pushed back against my own conviction with equal force, who judged the hair, who looked at me in disgust.  It was she who could not, who refused to see the thoughts behind the action, the tension and struggle.
I had thought it was them, the great nameless of society, thinking, moving, bulging as one big mass. I never thought it would hit so strong, come right back without ever leaving our house, come with such force from the single person tasked with guiding me through the world.
She has always wanted me to be different.  After nose rings and tattoos, it is now her obsession to hide my trees and mermaids from polite society, to hide me from the bikers and drug addicts they will attract, to hide my transgression and keep it locked in the dark attic of our household. 
This is not the girl she imagined, not the girl she wanted, the girl who would travel Europe- not Mexico. The girl who would go to a university and get a career and a Jewish husband, who would provide grandchildren. 
These wishes, pushed onto me since birth, have gone unanswered. I am not what she wanted. I am asked to hide myself, to shave, to wear long dresses, to go along with the lies she has woven about career and status. I have lost interest, the sting has dulled though every rematch is a burden- the tug and pull of my own thoughts wondering if I should please her, shock her, ignore her, and which one of my actions is coming from which thought? 
What hurts more? Covering myself time and again or seeing the disapproval in her eyes, the ashamed glance down as she looks at my skin? She has never taken me as I am and I have never cut the string, the threads of just a few colors which bind us together.

Mask

I dashed out of the house and ran to the bus stop, clumsily arranging the thick scarf around my neck.
I had spent the last few hours stressing and obsessing over my attire. The annual office Christmas party was scheduled for today. An email had been sent yesterday, reminding everybody that the party was at the Four Seasons Hotel. We were all required to look “presentable.” The men were required to wear a coat and a tie. The women had to look just elegant enough without going past a certain invisible line. Not too much, not too little. Just enough.
This is where the ordeal started. I pulled out almost every outfit I owned, every last shoe, everything I could find in my closet. My cousin was on the other side of the video phone watching me as I tried on one outfit after another, approving and disapproving my choices with a clear discernment that I simply didn't have. I had no idea how to dress, what to wear and what not to wear. The subtle rules of this masquerade escaped my mind, I had never been privy to these intricate instructions.
I thought of this while I ran to the bus stop early in the morning. Why did I worry so much about what to wear?  Why was it so important to control how I looked, how others saw me? What was the meaning behind the requirement to look presentable? What did it say about me? What did it say about them?
Through a change in clothes, I would disguise my wild and chaotic nature, I would pretend to be in complete control of my own persona, my actions, my thoughts. I could be as normal and as mature as they were, as they seemed to be, as I assumed they were. There I would be, looking like them, wearing the uniform, part of the group. A question wrapped in a lie, a stumbling fish trying to swim over quickly drying mud.
I was gasping and stepping into the bus stop when I was suddenly greeted by the face of a dirty homeless man. He was so blonde and fair, and he was so happy, so happy I thought the sun had come down to say good morning through his wide open eyes.
"Look, look!" he said cheerfully, “A guy just dropped three thousand dollars in cash!"
I looked down at his hand. Between his dirt encrusted fingers there were rolls and rolls of $100 dollar bills, a package of myriad possibilities squeezed to the size of a fist. As I looked at him again, I saw him turn back into a dull, dirty old man. It was the bills that were shining like gold on his fingers.  
I realized he was probably right. To judge by the amount of bills he was holding, there was probably a good three thousand dollars there, or even more. 
"Put that back! Put that back” I told him, realizing suddenly that his appearance and the money didn’t go together, they would clearly stand out like a sore thumb in this mostly empty street.
He was putting himself in danger by boldly showing this treasure he had just found, this anonymous treasure that had just found him through some unknown random process that had now chosen to include me.
There was an obvious disagreement between his attire and such a large amount of money. Gold and rags, riches and dirt, power and weakness. People would stare, they might call the police, they might beat him up, they would accuse him of having stolen it.
“Please!” I asked again. “Put it away, don’t let anybody see it”.
He looked at me, suddenly realizing I was being serious. He sat on the bench and the smile faded from his face while his eyes were fixed on mine.
“I don’t care about the money.”
The tone of his voice had changed. He was no longer a homeless man, he was now a being detached from society, detached from this planet, detached from his mask. He was a kid, a grown kid who saw the world as a giant playground. He was once again shining brightly, he was the man I had seen first before I noticed his costume. The money in his hand turned into a dull plastic object, with no possible value.
Its only value was the adoration a child gives to a toy when he is playing with it, a gift freely given, a gift easily taken away. Only while playing would the toys shine with life, they would then be forgotten and cast away.
I saw him, my eyes wide open. I listened to him very attentively as he started to narrate his story: he once worked as a contractor, he made a lot of money. He used to live in San Diego, big house, two kids, a wife, a dog. His daughter was making good money now.
“Do you have any children?” he asked me.
“No.” I answered while gazing to see if the bus was coming.
“Do you make good money?”
“I make enough, I guess.” I said, while getting myself ready to board the bus that was now stopping next to me.
“Would you like a hundred dollars?” He said with a mischievous smile.
“No, I am ok,” I said, while slowly walking towards the door of the bus.
“Take it!” he said, “Just one bill!”
“No, thank you!” I said while smiling and walking up to the bus.
I sat next to a nicely dressed lady who was texting with her smart phone. I couldn’t help thinking of this man.
There was a clear disagreement between his shiny golden treasure and his dirty appearance. The mask didn't fit the event, the event cast an unflattering shadow on the mask. A man dressed in rags could not be so lucky, could not get so lucky, could not.
I looked down at what I was wearing, the costume I had worn to pass myself off as one of them, the lucky ones. I adjusted my scarf and slid backwards on the seat. I prepared my face for the masquerade that was waiting. One more among many. One more mask to hide a question I couldn't even begin to answer.

The Spheres of Galia Part 3

The feast would be strikingly minimal, composed of fare provided by the King’s own garden and the main course cooked simply, made of the common rooftop hen. In the grand dining room, there was nothing present that could suggest extravagance of any kind. There was no pre-dining entertainment, no dancing, no jesting. The tables were covered in simple ivory linen and a single goblet, plate and fork for every guest. The gold utensils and embroidered napkins had been kept in the closets, out of simple necessity, the room was alive with the light of a thousand red and white wax candles.

Half a dozen war-weary soldiers recently returned from Vitnu were present and still adjusting to the Sphere after several years away. Dominious had them seated to the left of his vacant chair. All of these gestures of humility and concern had been orchestrated to prove to his fellow Red Hats that their values and causes where still close to his heart. He hoped to prevent defections by Red Hats that could sink the proposal he had recently worked out with their rivals, the Yellow Hats. They were here, those Council members who had been Lords and Clergymen before becoming members of the illustrious Council, and also those Red Hats who did not sit upon the Council, among these Lord Avin.

“Many Yellow Hats seem ready to embrace the compromise and declare victory,” he said to Dominious as they strolled together through the clusters of men and sweet-scented women waiting to be seated. “The question is whether enough Red Hats will join them in support, especially in the Council, where resentment of your concessions run strong.” Dominious glanced sideways at Lord Avin, his mouth turned down at the corners, but not so strongly that it could be declared a frown.

“And you? What do you think?” he asked while maintaining his forward glance.

Lord Avin sighed, “you know that I am forever your most ardent servant,” he said, and then looked to the King as if he wished to say more. Dominious turned to him and nodded to continue. “I fear that you lose site of the doctrines of our brotherhood. We are stewards of the people, and the Yellow Hats serve only themselves. The people are hungry and over-taxed. They and their children are dying in this bloody drawn-out war. They were sympathetic to the Lucen Scribes, and now that Olslo is dead, the sense of injustice has become heightened. These were wrongs begun during your brother’s reign, and it was believed that after his death, you would set them right, but you yield to the desires of the Yellow Hats at every turn…”

Dominious raised a hand to silence Avin. “You must understand, they are a force to be reckoned with. And they are not entirely wrong. The imprisonment of the Lucen Scribes was necessary, the security tax is necessary, ferreting out our enemies is also necessary. Don’t forget, most of our brethren on the Council voted for the war during my brother’s reign, and for the security tax as well. They understood these necessities then.” Dominious pressed a hand to his forehead, searching for words to explain the particular box he now found himself in, the pressure that came from all sides and prevented action in any direction. “They are like unruly children, both brotherhoods. We must preserve the kingdom. I will speak to all of our brethren tonight. I must make them understand.”

Dominious left Avin to take his place at the head of the table. Soon all were seated at the great horseshoe arrangement of tables. The room buzzed with chatter and the clinking of silverware. An electric lute strummed quietly by the attending bard who sang softly of the orphans housed by Dominous and of the new temples of healing established throughout the kingdom.

Over the general clatter the King caught fragments of conversation. The Red Hats with seats on the Council criticized the compromise, sometimes harshly, but stopped short of saying they would try to stop it. In the middle of it all, the King sat pale and bent in his chair, his face harrowed with creases. His poultry and stewed vegetables remained untouched and grew cold. In the candlelight, the dark circles under his eyes gave him the appearance of a man in the final stages of illness. His thin hands played idly with the silverware as he waited for his moment to speak.

Newness

Fortune could be so cruel. She had been a real beauty in her day; rosy cheeked, blue eyed, with hair of strawberry gold. A sun bonnet, a crisp blue and white striped dress, two dainty white booties, she had had them all. People, women and children especially, had passed her by and paused to look at her. She could see how they longed to hold her, to touch her dress, to stroke her silky hair. They looked at her with such wanting, and it filled her with pleasure and pride, exciting her beyond measure. That had been when she was new.
She had long since learned that it was not her that they had coveted, but rather her newness. She had possessed this quality then and they had adored her for it. Those had been wonderful days, when she shone bright and clean behind a wall of plastic. No one had dared handle her roughly then. The desire of these passing strangers had awakened desire within her, and soon when they stopped and admired her she wished that they would take her out of the box and clasp her to their breasts. She yearned for them to stroke her hair and touch her dress and cradle her in their arms.
One day a woman with soft white gloves fastened at the wrists by tiny pearls had stopped and smiled at her. Then, joy of joys! The woman had lifted her box from the shelf and carried her away to the man with the black mustache who sometimes dusted the shelves. As the woman carried her away she caught a glimpse of many other beauties behind plastic. They lined the shelves, some smaller, some larger, all watching her leave their ranks with apparent envy. It made her giddy inside.
In the woman’s home she met her first disappointment as the lady left her in the box and did not take her out and hug her as she had supposed would happen. She consoled herself with the woman’s charming smile, and the way she held the box and looked at her with such immense satisfaction. Then the lady put her in a dark closet and left her there for a few days. They were a terrible few days in which she thought that the woman must not have liked her at all. It seemed that she must have thought her so unattractive that she should be shut away in darkness where no one could ever see her again. But after those few days the woman took her out of the closet and smiled at her again and her fears were eased for a moment before the lady wrapped her box up in brightly colored paper. She was once again encapsulated in darkness and suspected that the woman was very unsatisfied with her and it depressed her very much.
She was carried away and heard so many strange sounds during the travel and wondered what was happening and whether she was still with the woman or not until the noise reaching into her dark cell was a positive uproar. She was set down and left stationary for quite awhile and she listened with a certain degree of fearfulness to the din outside. Then suddenly the paper was torn and she was abruptly blinded by the brightness of the world. As her vision came into focus it was the face of a little girl that peered down at her through the plastic. The girl beamed, and shouted,
“Oh! She’s so pretty!”
“Thank your Aunt Gertrude.” Another woman’s voice commanded and the child complied with a sugary sweet,
“Thank you aunt Gertrude.”
And she heard the woman who had first worn the gloves with the pearls say,
“You’re welcome darling.”
Then she had been set aside where she could see a number of children sitting around on a green rug and the little girl continued to open more brightly colored parcels. Each time she was reminded who to thank and then she would deliver another mechanically sweet,
“Thank you.”
And some little girl would smile and say, you’re welcome, or a little boy would stick out his tongue or blush. Then at last they had all gone away and sang and it wasn’t until much later that the girl had returned and opened the box and taken her out.
How to describe that first moment, as the box opened and she felt her spirit whirl like a dozen butterflies and then hot little hands had gripped her, and at last, at long last, she had been hugged. She was pressed against a beating heart and listened to its rapid thumping.
And after the girl had been helped into her pajamas and had brushed her teeth she had been tucked into bed, and who was tucked in beside her? Who was snuggled and cradled in little arms? Who listened to a child’s breathing grow quieter and slower until it was a soft rhythmic whisper and then listened to the heartbeat slow and join the chorus of sleeping sounds? That had been the best night of her life. She had been so happy. That was the first night that her newness began to be rubbed away.
The rest of it was stripped rapidly from her in the following days. She was taken into a garden and made muddy during a tea party with a stuffed bear. A shoe was lost during that same trip. Then her clothes had been stripped from her, and with horror she watched as they were placed on another, another whose face was already dirty and whose hair was already matted and who sneered at her after she was clothed in her dress. She was given something else to wear, something ripped and torn. She was spanked for being a bad baby who cried too much and was pushed under the bed. She was taken into a bath after which her hair lost its silky shine. Her head was pulled off another time and had to be put back on by mother, and another time she was even forced into a sexual encounter with the stuffed bear she had met at that first tea party.
There were moments when she felt a glimmer of that first happiness, when the girl hugged her again and seemed to love her. More often she was subject to every sort of humiliation that a child can contrive for a play thing, or simply neglected entirely.
Years passed by. She could not have said what had become of her shoes or her dress. A new baby doll wore her bonnet. She lived most of the time in darkness somewhere, under a bed, in a closet with other sad things.
Then one day a smaller child with big blue eyes had stumbled into the girls room and found her under the bed. This child was more of a baby than a little girl, but for the first time in a long time she felt a glimmer of happiness as the little creature rescued her from the gloom beneath the bed and cooed at her and giggled and sucked on her hands. When this child was put down for its nap it held her tightly and nearly never let go of her after that. She still saw the girl from time to time, but she was never bothered by her again. The littler blue eyed girl loved her now. As the blue eyed girl grew up she attended more tea parties and was given different dresses to wear. Mothers help was enlisted to clean her plastic skin of grime. The games were gentler than they had been with the first girl. Most nights she was kissed and tucked in bed beside the blue eyed girl. All in all it was a nice time and as the blue eyed girl grew and was home less, she was given a place on a shelf and no longer was played with or carried to bed. During that time though, she was safe and clean and given a place where she could see the comings and goings of the blue eyed girl until one day when blue eyed girl was much taller she left and never came back.

That had marked the definite end of newness, although in truth it had already worn off some time ago. Mother put her and many others in boxes and they were all sent away. She fell into the hands of several children after that, none quiet as kind as Blue Eyed girl had been and a few nearly as cruel as the first girl. Head on, head off, clothes on, clothes off, in a box, out of a box, under a bed, in a box, out of a box. But none of the boxes that she was put in during all that time was ever like the first box with its plastic window that could protect her. At last she passed out of the hands of children all together.
Then she lived in a musky old shop in an antique baby buggy with a handful of others. It was a retirement home for things whose newness had been done away with long ago. Everyone had been cleaned. Everyone had something to wear. Now sometimes people passed by as they had done in the very beginning and paused to look at her, but never with the longing that she had seen in their eyes in her youth. Now they looked with curiosity or sympathy and occasionally with something like fear. She had been a real beauty in her day; rosy cheeked, blue eyed, hair of strawberry gold. Now she was faded. Now she was among those things which had passed far beyond the interest of the young and lively, but just because they no longer wanted her, it did not mean that she no longer wanted them. Despite all of the pains that had bit at her heart, she still longed to be held, longed to have someone touch her dress and stroke her hair, just once more.

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.

Bunny Suit

The small storage room is crowded with large cardboard boxes of paper plates. Small boxes with white napkins and plastic drinking cups are scattered among the cartons of household cleaners and milk crates of packaged snack foods. Along the walls are old wooden shelves assembled by a forgotten handyman, each level stuffed with dusty unlabeled boxes that have been left for time to dispose of. The floor is a peeling particleboard that promises a new life within its cracks, a world of pressed fissures and lost landscapes, but there is no time to explore, the revelers are already outside and their sounds seep through the metal door that separates the storage room from the greater world. The cries from outside speak of shapes not yet seen and of laughter without reason. The room of many boxes shakes and rolls with the burden of forms. Circles, folded rectangles, plastic forks, spilled sugar packets. Used to quiet afternoons and the slow gathering of dust, the room with its lost inventory has a rarified stillness about it. Despite the noise seeping through the cracks, despite the vibrating walls, despite the four girls sitting among the piles of cardboard boxes. There is stillness, the all-encompassing silence before the orgasm. The moment of held breath, just the singular beat of life making its subtle music. The girls sit for lack of choice, there is no space but the one path in front of the door. It reaches through the heart of the space, crossing it like a path through the forest, then disappears into the mess of spilled boxes excreting their white paper blood.
Three of the girls are small and slender, just a few years over twenty. Norma lets her body melt into the unexplored floor, her eyes linger on the long strips of pressed wood beside her shoe, but she looks up and lets her back push into the forgiving wall of a worn box. Her head tilts slightly back, her eyes on the only thing moving. In the dim light it is hard to see, there are no windows. Somewhere far above, connected to the ground only with a long thin cord, is a lone light bulb.
Shouts of joy come in quick intervals from outside. The quiet neighborhood is alive with the bubbling of a growing celebration. The three slender girls are ready, but they are still and sit on the ground like relaxed statues. Three sets of eyes focus on Sheena, the largest of the four. She stands in the center of the small path through the room, wrestling with yards of furry fabric. The roundness of her thighs, the bulging ass and layers of stomach make it difficult for her to fit in the suit, but she pulls and zips and squeezes herself into the costume. She pulls the oversized head on and they are finally ready. Three young women and one gigantic gray bunny.
The fur is a welcome second skin. The streets are crowded and she would rather no one sees her pale wide flesh. Its just easier this way. Three pretty girls and one gray bunny. The people on the street will look at her, and for once, she will not be afraid to stare into their eyes. Only no one meets her stare. The street is full of revelers, only she is so strange, no one even turns their head in her direction. She wonders if they can tell she is inside. Do they know someone is inside? Do they care? “Hey, I’m human!” she wants to scream, but no one looks up. The frail looking couple, the old man, the skater boy, not one looks up from the sidewalk, not one looks into the plastic eyes of the bunny suit, no one searches for her own smaller pair seeking theirs. The corner of the street is packed with people, the crowd stands awkwardly at a street light, waiting for the signal to move. The big bunny face looks down, into the seat of a small gray stroller. A baby looks up, into the false plastic eyes that point in its own direction. The small face stares, a deadpan expression on its face for two seconds, then it erupts into a large smile.

Collector

She walked the streets of the sprawling city, looking for the perfect bit of trash. She of course, did not call it trash, that was a word her mother used. To her, they were all orphans, forgotten remnants, alone on the sidewalk, waiting to be found, hoping for a loving home. In her purse, she had small plastic baggies full of used cigarette butts and empty matchbooks and carefully folded pieces of old newspapers. With her eyes trained towards the ground, she walked past blocks and blocks of the famous fashion quarter. Hardly ever did her eyes wander to the plate glass windows that held the spectacle of mannequins in a static state of style. Hordes of fashionable young women walked by her, their high heels provided the music to her quest. She heard them, she heard their squeals, their chatter, their laughter, but their image went past her like a blur. When she wasn’t crossing streets or waiting for taxi cabs to pass her like yellow bats out of hell, her eyes were fixed to the sidewalk, to the cracks where litter seemed to gather for the party, to the gutters where she always found delight, to the 90 degree angles where cement sidewalk and storefront always met. A perfumed woman passed her, both their minds fixed on a particular obsession, an accumulation of things…one looking for new things, the other searching for the forgotten.
She took in a big breath of the city air. She had not been out here for a while. Over the last few months, her free days had become fewer and fewer, until she was only able to hit the streets on a dedicated mission every couple of weeks. Yes, she did walk the streets every day, gathering milk and eggs at the market or taking her mother to the doctor, but it was never the same when she had a destination, the needed the space and time to make the day about the journey, when all her attention could be on the sidewalk and its treasures. She carried her containers with her in a little metal push wagon. There were glass jars and small cardboard boxes for leaves and plastic forks. What she found was categorized and organized. She didn’t wait for later.
She stood on the street, amid gray soldiers in business suits and delivery drivers and creamy white women. Those women were like her sister, they would never see her collection as tasteful, even after a careful explanation. The women who gathered new handbags and French perfume just could not understand why she carried the remnants of the city with her. She had tried before, years ago when she was still figuring out her methods for categorization, when she was just beginning to feel the itch of the hunt.
Today, she was walking along the many jewelry stores of the fashion district. This is where people with piles of money came to buy piles of things. This was her favorite hunting ground. In the center of extreme consumption, she delighted in the salvage. She would not let the wrapper be forgotten, she would not let the grocery list find its way to the sea. She had their brother and sisters, she had others like them, she was the orphan hunter, the subculture collector.
She spotted something round and green, she stooped over, calm, with the grace of a rescuing angel… she picked up the small bottle cap in her gloved hand. Against the brown of her leathered fingers, the cap glistened with beauty. She turned it over and over, feeling as best she could the ridges along the side, the light of the sun reflected off the green metal and gleamed. Fifteen years ago, she would have walked by the cap, oblivious to its existence. She too, had been a fashionable, perfumed woman. She would have never known its temporary home, she would have walked by, never seeing its green, never touching its shape, never pausing to see what was there.
Tasteful? That was a question that the germ-a-phobes and the critics could debate. Her days had become fewer and fewer, she didn’t have time to waste with questions. She knew what she needed to do. She knew her place among the denizens of the city. She was the self-appointed historian, the archivist, the matron. The women and men of the city might never know she had been here. On her walks, she took away any signs of her voyage, tucking them safely in her cart, either in a box, bottle, or plastic bag. She gave them a home, and the fashion district might never know she had passed by.

Goals and Movement

He pushed the heavy shopping cart by leaning forward and resting all his weight on the metal handle. The cart was specially heavy today because they had loaded it with many extra supplies which they intended to use for trade. His woman had found an abandoned baby stroller just a couple of days earlier.
She was so happy when she came running up to him in the late morning, right when he was sitting among a group of friends close to the old smelly tunnel covered in moss and moist with old rain water. She ran right up to him and said: "I found something good. You have to come and help me get it!" but he was too aware of the looks that the other men gave each other as she approached, so he replied: "I don’t have to do nothing woman. I am free as a bird. That’s what makes us special. That’s what keeps us going! Look around!" and he signaled to all the men that sat around him, with their eyes bubbling up red and crisscrossed with sharp red veins and their blackened gloves which protected their blackened hands and their pants that smelled of old sweat and piss and shit and their chins still dribbling with beer and all of them nodded back at her, acknowledging their freedom, their carefree lifestyle which allowed them to do as they wished, and he nodded once again, looking back at her: "See, free as birds and you don’t tell me what to do!" Right then she realized her mistake and slid backwards a little and she whispered, as if to nobody: "I know where it is. Just tell me when you feel like getting it. I can wait." And she walked away and sat by a tall tree and slowly chewed on an old chocolate bar that she had been saving in the side pocket of her old ripped up pants.
About an hour later, he came over to her and said: "Don’t ever pull something like that again! You know that we have little, but at least we have our reputation!" and she nodded and agreed that she had made a mistake and then she led him to where the baby stroller was hiding, where someone had thrown it away in the middle of a web of branches that hung over a pit of trash. He saw it and smiled and nodded to her and he could tell right away that it would come in very handy for them, so he said: "Look after my cart and I will climb around the trees and will get it."
All of that had been a couple of days earlier. The next two days they spent begging pedestrians on Haight street for a little change here and there and they bought old things from other beggars and they scavenged through trash bins and they looked in the metal bins outside of the houses and they even stole a few beers from the local liquor store and finally they were ready. They wrapped it all in bags and loaded up the shopping cart, which always keeled over to the side because one of the wheels was bent, and they loaded up the baby stroller which she had found and he had managed to rescue.
When everything was ready, he said to her: "Now we will go for a long walk, you understand? I know you haven’t been with me long, but now you have to walk with me." She was still fixing the baby stroller just right so that things wouldn’t fall off when she pushed it. When the sound of his voice came to her, she looked up at him, clearing some thick dark snot from her nose, "Sure thing… but where are we going?" He smiled and looked at her with sharp eyes, "We’re going all the way to the beach. There’s a whole other crew over there and I’m friends with some of them. They always have some good stuff, it’s easier to get it over there, but other things you can’t get at all. So we will bring them some of this stuff and they will go crazy happy and then they will give us some of what we want." She nodded, "You sure? I wouldn’t want to go all the way over there for nothing." He frowned and leaned over her, suddenly terribly disappointed that he had shared this knowledge with her. "Look, I’m going all the way to the beach, I’m going to see the crew that’s over there, they’re friends of mine. You can come along if you want to, or you can stay here and wait, or you can go to hell for all I care…" She looked up at him with wide eyes and he was breathing hard and looking down at her with a smirk in his face, and his cheeks were stained with grease and old dirt and his eyes were bloodshot and his chin was all gooey with trails of saliva. He took a deep breath and then he talked again. "Look, it’s better if you come, because I can’t push the cart and the baby stroller at the same time, and now we have more shit, so we have more responsibilities… you can push the stroller, I will push the cart... are you ready?" She shrugged and stood up and said: "Yeah, I’m ready. I don’t have nothing else to do right?" "Right," he said and they started on their way.
Now they were just over a third of the way there and he couldn’t say out lout what he was thinking because what he was thinking resembled too much what she had said: "What if they don’t have nothing? What if they’re not even there?’ and the sweat was dripping over his face, and down his back, and his arms were hurting and his legs were hurting and he was pushing as hard as he could but the heavy cart moved so slowly that it sometimes seemed that it wasn’t moving at all. She was quiet next to him, also drenched in sweat but not as bad as him, and pushing on the stroller and looking ahead, all the way to where a sliver of white and blue outlined their final destination.
They came to a corner and stopped while a loud truck passed by. He grunted and gasped for breath and she said: "You alright?" and he said "Yeah, I just need to rest for a bit." She nodded and took a deep breath herself, looking up at the trees and at few birds that were flying among the branches. "Let’s rest a little, but let’s not stop too long. We have to make it all the way to the beach today. You said so yourself." He nodded and grabbed onto the handle of the heavy cart again. "Yeah, I know I said so and we’re going. I can rest a bit later. I think we’ll make it today." She nodded and pushed the stroller across the street. "Oh, we will. I know we will. You said so yourself." And they slowly crossed the corner, and kept on slowly making their way to the beach. "You said so yourself. You sure did…"

The Game

The lines outside the amusement park wrapped around the brigade of hot dog vendors and past the lone Mexican man selling little cups of Red Fire Juice and past the young blond teenager on the outskirts of the park, a girl wearing small white shorts and a red baseball cap that matched the logo on the various novelty items she hawked from her push cart. The small cart was laden with baseball caps to match her own, T-shirts and coffee cups and pencils and shoelaces, dozens of items that people, mostly families with small children, could buy and take home to remember their time at the park. And the girl believed that they would remember their experience while they carried the items to the car and then perhaps when they used them occasionally, but she always imagined that the pencil or T-shirt would eventually become an object in and of itself, distinct from the memory of the rides and the popcorn and the $4 hot dogs. And for some reason, whenever she thought of this, she was sad.
This particular Monday, the lines were obscene, worse than they were on the weekends, on the unobserved days of the Sabbath, the lines demanded more patience than almost all people had, more than they could endure. But they did, they would wait for hours, sometimes a whole afternoon to take a 60 second ride. For a brief cluster of seconds, the roller coaster would turn them upside down, swish them to the right, to the left, in a full 360 turn. It would turn their reality into a fleeting mush of colors, their thoughts would vanish, their worries and hopes and desperate desires, for a couple of seconds, the exhilaration of flight was all that remained.
This Monday, the lines were off the charts. Three new games had just been released and the arcade at the amusement park was the only place in all of Los Angeles county to have them. The nerds did not avoid the lines. They came in van after van, truck load after bus load. This day was one of the most important of the year, a pinnacle after months of waiting and reading the buzz and the reviews and occasionally hearing sensational rumors. This was the day, the time to confirm or deny, the moment to test their skill, to feel out the new story, to marvel at the new graphics, to grow hard to the jiggling of animated women, images that always seemed to grow ever larger breasts with each new edition of the game.
The boys in line, the theft of their innocence was long gone, raped years ago by marketing firms and designers with billion dollar budgets and the very society which opened its legs to capitalism, already wet, the seeds long ago sown, decades before the first ships arrived. This land, and in particular, the nexus of Los Angeles, was the world’s most foul experiment. A conglomeration of shiny cars and skinny celebrities and a hope for stardom that kept bringing more fresh meat to the eventual slaughter. To win in this land meant losing everything. No one ever came out the same, and not in the scientific way in which everything changes and time shifts every single one of our molecules…the change here was different, it was light turning to shadow, robots crumbling to clumps of molten steel. The large white letters stayed where they were put and those in their shadows kept up the constant drinking of brown air, young men became slicker shadows of themselves. Women became painted versions of the pictures they burned upon arrival. The town bred a strangeness that was not easily described, and yet could be felt by the watchers.
To win in this land was to dive deep into the world of the unreal. Where cars were easy to steal, where they drove for hours without a flattened bug or an acquired particle of dust. In this unreal landscape, explosions earned points and no matter how many crashes the car endured, the driver could always walk away unscathed. This was the world’s hidden army. Sitting on beds behind closed doors, in the darkness of an arcade or the confines of a basement, this was the hidden race. The theft of their identify had been used as satire and parody, but they were all too present. As much as Hollywood tried to avoid its unglamorous half, here they were, in front of brightly lit screens, waiting in lines that stretched for miles.
These were the games of the year, perhaps of the decade. And they were there to mark its coming, to mark its existence, to experience its passing. And they waited, in the lines that seemed to never move, yet they did, like the lines that appeared after years on a well worn face, they made their way into the unreal.

Friend Behind The Mask

I extend my hand deep into the quick sands of time and lock my hand around something which has been pulled down deep by the strength of gravity. With grave effort, with great curiosity and a sense of awe, I unearth a little katchina doll, a creature with dark brown eyes and tan skin. Her hair is short now, but I remember when it was long and tangled, a massive web of a thick dark mane. Now I am in her kitchen. The window overlooks Beach street and a white building across the way. It is a beautiful window which lets bright sunshine in.
She chops, stirs and shuffles around the kitchen with a look of seriousness frozen upon her face. Her body is plumper than I remember. The girl I knew had muscular legs and arms, her body was lean. I try to capture her in a photograph. The photo is wrong, this is not the girl I remember, but a glance upward reveals that it is an image of the woman before me. The stress, the anger and frustration, I had thought it was all a game, a mask she liked to try on when we were younger, but now it seems bigger than her, a presence that holds her captive. Her new friends expect it. She expects it. A familiar persona.
Searching for my playmate of old, I continue to take picture after picture. I am always looking at her carefully, looking for what I want to see revealed. So often she is grimacing, it looks as if she is in great and terrible pain. Her face flickers with variations of the endless grimace. There is a smile that is a tight mask of horror, a neutral facial expression that looks as if she is baring her teeth menacingly, and a frown that seems to be the least pained of the three. Her neck is tight.
Sitting at the table at last, so much of the work has passed, and even now that she is more relaxed, she is more of something that I thought was an act as a child. I wait patiently to see my friend and at last, for no particular reason, our eyes meet and she is there for a flash, surprised and relieved that I was waiting there for her. My heart tingles warmly because she is alive behind all that heavy armor.
Later amid talks of workouts in the gym and loss of weight, I suggest that she go back to chasing after ice cream trucks. For a moment she is there again, the girl I remember, and she is glad that I remember. And I do, I do remember Angela. I remember that we tore down the burning white sidewalks, the pads of our bare feet pounding against that scalding surface with a dull thud, our hair flying wildly behind us. Faster and faster we ran, listening to the retreating sound of Beautiful Dreamer played over a loud speaker, unable to slow down lest we should feel the horrible burning sidewalk on our soles, unable to stop lest we should loose all hope of catching that van full of cold treats. We ran and ran and ran. The way I remember it, we never caught the truck. The way I remember it, we didn’t really care if we caught the truck. We said that we did care just to have a reason to run like this, like wild things down the meandering circles that were the streets that made up our neighborhood. We ran until the circle had brought us back home, to her green front yard, to the porch where all the shoes sat unused in a basket near the deep shade of a huge tropical plant.
Today we walk with shoes on, back to her apartment with its big bright windows. We walk back with my youngest daughter and, in the dim elevator, I ask my old friend if she remembers the opening line to Glinda’s song from the Wizard of Oz. I can’t remember the tune.
"I can’t sing." She tells me. But she can sing. I know she can. She can sing every song from the entire movie. She is singing it and dancing in the front yard near the sidewalk while we wait for the ghostly sounds of an ice cream truck to find its way to us.
I extend my hand deep into the quick sands of time and lock my hand around something which has been pulled down deep by the strength of gravity. I will not let go. I will not forget, not ever. So long as I am, I will see to it that our soles burn forever, that we sing, breath easily and run un-shoed for all eternity.