Rise of the Old King

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him, incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and shadow.

He came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream, shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.

In our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but death had won over it.

Among the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one of these worlds.

Eventually, the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.

There would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed, his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened.  The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word: vanquished.  He walked amongst us once more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest floor.  

Bound To The Moment

When he got locked up, he knew it was my fault.  He never failed to remind me, if he wanted some plastic toy from Kentucky Fried Chicken or a new shirt from the skate shop, he somehow twisted every particle in the air between us and then that inner itch began to tickle.  That subtle and yet overwhelming wave of guilt that worked its way in from the extremities until its firm grasp was tightening around my chest. 
I spent 6 years trying to make up for one sentence said to the wrong person. Six years trying to dig my way out of sorrow and regret with money. Shirts, shoes, cigarettes, cds, concert tickets, milk, orange soda, hot dogs, art supplies, a silk screen press, heroin, lots and lots of heroin.
I worked and he spent as he wanted and I knew it was all because of that one sentence blurted out at dawn in the police station. One damn sentence condemned him as a felon forever. A string of words put him in minimum security jail for two months.
When I first saw him in that bright orange cotton pajama uniform and had to pick up a telephone to talk to him through the glass in the visitation booth, I thought I would crumble. I ran around town meeting with lawyers and bail bondsmen, I looked for an apartment and picked classes for the upcoming term.  I went to his court dates wearing the purple paisley skirt he liked and every gemstone I owned for protection. I put the red garnet ring his mother had sent me on my left hand and walked into the courtroom, knowing I had put him there, knowing I needed to get him out.
I did what I could for him, depositing extra money into his ‘inmate account’ so he could buy extra food. I went back to my job and saved money for his bail, I accepted the collect phone calls and then worked like hell to pay them off. 
When he was sentenced to two months I went to visit him faithfully every Sunday. He had been placed at “the farm,” the low security building by the city dump. It was a one story facility without fences or barbed wire, there were cats and peacocks that roamed the grounds. There he was issued white linen pants and a thick jeans jacket. We were allowed contact on those visits and he had me smuggle in cigarettes under my jacket, which I always hated to do.
He got a job in the kitchen and I was impressed when he told me he made a mini mountain made of melon pieces and parsley. I thought that he found ways to make even the worst of circumstances beautiful.  He became the resident artist and drew pictures for the wives and girlfriends of other inmates.  On Valentine’s weekend he presented me with a drawing of a sleeping mermaid with her arms wrapped around a heart-shaped moon.
I would arrive early on Sundays and be one of the first people in line, which was the way I insured we would have the full visit time of two hours. We would kiss and I would wear a skirt and sometimes he would touch my clit and I would leave there sopping wet.
Six months after he got out our troubles really began.  The heroin became a necessity. I lived with the fear of death or jail. I wanted to save him, I wanted to be with him, the guy who drew and made me laugh, but I had not seen him in years. 
I kept trying to make up for my initial wrong, but it just never worked- he only got worse. He was out of jail, but I had never left that one moment, that damn sentence, those few little words.

Prison Escape

Today, I escape from prison.

It is a dream, one I have to claw and smile and swallow my way out of. It is a dream with beep…beep…beep…and paperwork and cloth robes and bleached walls.

There are bars on the beds and they hide the sun, protecting us from nature with thick walls and windows that cannot open. The smell of chlorine burrows its way inside, first covering my arms and legs, then coming in through long streams of tainted breath, making a nest in my worn-out lungs.

In this prison, ladies wear white clothes and white shoes that match their white skin. The whites of their eyes shine down on me like evil dogs that fail to mask contempt. They hand me long white pills between polished nails, urging me on with pained white smiles. “Swallow- it’s good for you.” I watch their nodding heads, their obsessive trust in this medicine.

I lay in bed later, the effects of that long white pill making me shudder. I am cold. I am hot. I am sick. I am cold. I am hot. I am sick. It is a dream of beep…beep…beep…and paperwork and cloth robes and bleached walls.

Men walk the halls with big egos and white coats and little pens that click closed with authority. They know what’s best and urge me on though white teeth and hard eyes, “here’s another pill- now swallow.”

There are carts with airplane food served with more false smiles and plastic spoons. The smell overcomes me, reminding me of death and old soil and chemicals.

Each room in prison has an old lady that moans all night. She’s there just to keep me awake. Just as I doze off I hear her ragged breath, just as I drift into dreams the vampire comes around to take more blood. He reaches through the bars of my bed, searching for my arm, laughing when he sees my eyes, “no, one gallon was not enough.”

As I slip once again into a place beyond the bleached white, they put a band around my arm. Pump, pump, squeeze. Just another test, but they don’t want me better. They deprive me of food, sleep, and air. They hold back laughter and humor, looking at me in disgust when I say I have to get home to water my Farmtown Facebook crops. “They’re dying” I say. I see their eyes of cold hard black. There is death in their white robes and white eyes, death in their painted white smiles. Is this where I’ll die?

They already made me sign the paperwork just in case and it must be their plan. Their pills, their tests, their bars and old food.

They attach a dozen cords to my body with sticky tape. The plastic tentacles hold me back, the tape latches to my skin. They gave me a gown that I can’t walk in, so I stay in bed. I hear the wheels of the food cart and squeaky steps in the bleached hall.

The lady in the next bed moans. The machinery she’s attached to beeps and beeps and beeps. No one comes. I try to find some fresh air, I seek out the breeze but it’s all sealed, zombies sit at every corner.

“Are you OK?” they ask. I smile and say yes, holding back the tides of black anger that want to wash their white world away. If I was OK I wouldn’t be here. I would be sitting in the fresh air, dozing without the beeping sounds of machinery and the vampire and the rotting food.

To escape from prison I have to do everything they say. I swallow, I eat, I watch the election results on TV though a smile of white teeth. As I try to walk out the door they hold back one leg with excuses and paper work and pills. More drugs, more bullshit as the door swings shut.

It is a dream with beep…beep…beep…and paperwork and cloth robes and bleached walls. Today I escape.

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.

Tunnel

Dirt cakes my fingernails. The tunnel is small, just slightly wider than the width of my body. I burrow my way through like a tiny animal searching in the darkness. I keep going, though I have no tools. No night vision, no sense of smell, there is nothing but the long tunnel ahead. I cannot go back. There is no place to turn around and the dirt walls hold me without remorse, without love or affection, they simply hold me, propelling me forward through necessity. Long ago I saw a flickering candle within the tunnel. It was that night when I stepped into the small hole full of orange poppies. I wondered how they blossomed in the hole without light, how they had managed to find a way to survive only in the moon glow. They smiled in the warmth of the flickering candle and showed themselves cautiously to the moon. I stepped into the hole with a sliver of light and with a tickling that covered the inside of my chest. I took off the clothes that had covered me like a second dirty skin. The mud soaked shirt and torn panties, I left them on the grass beside the hole and stepped into a place I had never been. I moved without thoughts, doing only what felt right. My feet took me in three circles to the right, I held up my hand towards the moon and opened the palm. Silvery light came through the soft flesh of my hand and tunneled through the length of my arm, crawling into my chest and them meandering into the circular cavern of my uterus. A sense of fullness brought me to my knees and I dug through the soil with my hands until I found the small opening. I moved as if I had done it so many times before, as though I fulfilled the destiny of the stars with each movement. I wiggled into the tunnel on my stomach, using the strength of my elbows and forearms to push me into total darkness. There was no “front,” just endless black that opened before me. Never a wall, never a fork, just endless open territory. I kept moving until sleep overpowered me. I lay like the dead, allowing the drifting forms of flames to enter my mind while my body lay motionless in the tunnel. I awoke frightened, unsure of what I had done, terrified to find myself surrounded on all sides by the thick walls of earth. Moving backwards is impossible, so I continue on. Moving towards the place I might have been but do not remember. I keep going. There was a flame, a moon and solid perception. I had once felt something, I had known something beyond words, now I travel through the swamp of fear and dirt, moving towards a place that has no name.

When Do We Leave El Salvador?

When do we leave El Salvador?

Do we wait for a certain day

When the sun slides over the shivering leaves
And drips from their green edges like golden teardrops
And the sky itself is so blue as to seem transparent
And the wind is like a constant caress
From the most gentle of lovers.

Or do we leave on a day of storms
When there are gunshots in the distance
When there are large trucks full of black clad killers
Roaming through the shadows
With large heavy machine guns over their shoulders
Looking for their next victim,
Looking for a place to unload their wrath.

Do we leave when the walls have turned to dirt
And the dirt has turned to mud
And the mud has turned to sickness
And we can’t live here anymore
For we are just one step away from dying
And to be a step away
Is worse even than death itself
For it is shivers and pale faces and open eyes
And nights of waking dreams
And days of bright red nightmares.

Or do we wait until we are old
So old that the days themselves have grown shorter
And death is no longer so terrifying
For it has danced close to us so often
That it has become a well known friend,
And our body is slowly turning to dust
Right under our very eyes
And we can do nothing but allow it to enter
And take us where it wants to go,
And look into the distance and wonder
If something else comes later
Something
Anything
Anything at all.

Can we ever truly leave El Salvador?
Or do we carry it with us,
Like a stone that we swallowed when we were little
And it refuses to dislodge itself from our loins,
Is it now a part of us
As much as our eyes, our brain, our heart,
Is it so much an element of our nature
That no matter where we go,
There will come a morning of light breeze
And bright clear sunlight
When we will hear the bells of an ice cream cart outside the door
And we will hear the sound of kids laughing in the distance
The sound of feet hitting a plastic ball
The sound of cars turning slowly at the corner
And it will all be so clear as to be blinding
And the clarity will rush up to our chest
And hurt us in a way so strange,
So strange we won’t understand,
So strange we won’t even try to explain,
And the windows will be open
And the doors will be open
And our eyes will be open,
And then we will know
That we never truly arrived,
And we can never truly leave.

Anaconda On The Loose

One day the pet Anaconda in Mr. Wagman’s 1st grade class got out of its tank.
The class had forgotten to feed him for a whole year, so he was very, very, hungry.
He slithered behind Mr. Spooner who was mopping up somebody’s spilled milk.
He slithered up the long stairway.
He slithered past the 5th grade classes…
And past the 4th grade classes…
And past the 3rd grade classes…
And right into a second grade class room. Room 22, to be exact.
Nobody saw him wriggle by. Nobody saw him lift the latch with his nose, opening the guinea pig cage.
Nobody saw the guinea pigs leap out past the big snake’s wide open hungry mouth.
They ran right out of room 22 and into room 21 and leaped into the fish tank to hide.
Would you believe that nobody saw them come in?
Would you believe that nobody saw the Anaconda come slithering in either?
He was on his way to drink up all the water and swallow both guinea pigs and all the fish when something better caught his eye.
Cassandra and Olivia were cutting out paper apples.
The Anaconda wrapped himself around both Cassandra’s and Olivia’s chairs and started to SQUEEZE!
Then he swallowed both girls whole.
Elizabeth screamed.
Reem fainted.
Kayla didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
Joshua shouted, “Ms. Robinson, you should get them out like I would get them out!”
“And how is that Joshua?” Ms. Robinson asked, but he didn’t answer so she called the office.
Meanwhile, it was dark inside the Anaconda.
Cassandra thought fast. She still had her scissors so she used them to cut the Anaconda open.
Cassandra and Olivia sprang out of the Anaconda’s belly.
Everybody felt sorry for the big snake so Ms. Robinson sewed him back up just like a surgeon, only she used purple thread.
After that, the Principal, Mrs. Berk, called the zoo and they came to take Mr. Wagman’s Anaconda away.
They put him in a cage and carried him past the 3rd grade classes…
And past the 4th grade classes…
And past the 5th grade classes…
They carried him down the long stairway.
They carried him out behind Mr. Spooner who was mopping up somebody else’s spilled milk.
At last they stopped by room 4 and Mr. Wagman’s first grade class said goodbye to their pet.
The kindergartners poked their heads out of the doors and waved goodbye too.
Now the Anaconda with the purple stitches in his belly lives at the San Francisco Zoo and he is very happy there. The zoo keepers never forget to feed him.

A Family From The Mountains

They came from a tiny village in eastern Slovenia, where the high mountains were covered in thick trees and the winters were long and bleak. Even the summer months had a slight darkness about them, as though all the native creatures simply couldn’t let go of the cold memories of winter. They held on to them even through the warmest days, letting the shadows cover the fleeting moments of light. It would be the darkness, the increasing severity of the winters, that would push them away, far from the thick boulders and tall green trees that defined the land.
It was Tadej, the youngest son of the family, that first packed his sack and began the family migration. He left without any thought of a destination. He knew nothing of the world beyond the large village that lay at the valley floor, a day’s journey for him on mule-back. What lay further than this was a hazy vision that only existed within his imagination. He dreamt of colorful women, sweet wines and great shining cities of gold.
On the family farm, Tadej had been chosen as a courier, delivering the seasonal crops to the small markets of the local villages. Small businesses had been sprouting fast, they catered to the people that had stopped farming and devoted their labor to the small factories that had also began flourishing in the mountainous region. In ten years, he had watched many of his neighbors abandon their farms to move to the larger towns at the base of the mountains. As he watched them leave, with their burdened animals laden with bedding and house wares, he could not imagine leaving. He believed himself to be a man of the soil, dirty with earth and sweat. He gave his blood to the land, and in return, she delivered carrots and purple skinned potatoes. Year after year, she provided them with everything she was capable of…she gave herself to them without reservation, and he loved her for this. No, he could never leave. He liked visiting the towns, he rumbled past the apartment houses and the buildings of administration. He liked talking with the shop owners and young women who brought up water from the wells, but as the sun began to cool, he liked riding back to his home, his land at the top of the world.
When he arrived home, he always needed to put his barrels in the cellars. The cellars were deep and dark, Tadej remembered his grandfather shoveling out the earth to create the dark havens to store the vegetables. He had been a very small boy, and he remembered eating apple pieces out of a small wooden bowl while watching as the piles of loose soil piled high, like replicas of the mountains surrounding them. After putting away his supplies, he would give his mother the small piece chocolate she always requested from town.
She was a large woman, very plump and round. She had been made big and tough by the hearty diet of potatoes and tough meat, by the thick, cool air and the life of constant work. She would haul wood and beat dust from the family’s collection of colorful woolen rugs. The small wood house was laden with rugs. Tadej’s grandparents had been collectors, and in the summer nights, it would be common for travelling gypsy caravans to stop by their farm to show off their latest creations. Tadej remembered nights when the stars shined with complete abandon, and a group of travelers would crowd into their home, surrounding the hearth, singing sad songs of persecution to the upbeat melody of an accordion. Tadej, always a bit shy around people with such bravado, would watch quietly from a corner of the room, while the foreign women danced with their colorful scarves and his mother served liquor to all the guests.
Their move to the United States began five years before they voyaged by ship to the harbor of New York. The winters had been getting colder, Tadej first noticed it when the leaves of his favorite tree began to change colors in July. It was a mature tree that stood alone in a natural clearing of Silar trees. It was Tadej’s favorite tree and he visited it often. He sat and read at its base. Upon returning from his trips into town, he would come to it, tired and sleepy, and he would nap with one of its large roots in his arms. When his house seemed too small and the people within in just a bit too loud, he would bring a heavy rug and a thick blanket and spend the night outside by the base of the old tree.
He was dozing off in mid July, and a falling yellow leaf brushed across his face. With sleep filled eyes he gazed at it, simply observing its shape and color, without any thought to interrupt his exam. He just looked, as he would have looked at a small spider tramping across his skin. But then, his mind began to piece together associations, the way that brains do, and he saw the color, yellow. Yellow, the color of an approaching fall. But it was July, there should be months of sunshine until then. He looked up and saw that the upper canopy of the tree had begun to change colors. Most were still partially green, but the threat of an early winter was real. And when it came this early, it meant that winter would be especially cold and brutal. He took the leaf to his grandfather.
The old man had seen early seasons, but never by three months. The omen of the yellow leaf, as they came to call it, was the beginning of the coldest five years the tiny county had ever seen. Within this time, the growing times and harvests became shorter. In the first year, most of the radishes did not have enough time to grow before the first freeze. Then nearly the whole crop of the small purple potatoes froze in the cold hard ground. The family tried to dig them out, but the ground was as hard as a rock. Each year, the summer seemed to get shorter and the winter months intensified and spilled over into fall and spring. The gypsies had not come through in several years. Tadej figured they had remained in the more temperate lower altitudes.
After five years, the family’s resources were exhausted. They had cleared so much of the surrounding land for fire wood that the land was unrecognizable. The mules and horses required food that the land could no longer provide. The men of the family agreed that they could not survive another frozen season.
Tadej packed his small sack and set out in the early morning. He walked down the little road that he always took to town. But as the sun rose in the sky, and he entered the town, he did not stop at the well or the markets that had become fixtures in his weekly routine. He continued walking, out of town, past all the landmarks that were familiar to him. He took the road that brought other traders from the towns of the low lands. He walked, knowing he must find a better place to bring his family.
He was searching for more farmland, a place where he and his family could raise sheep and pigs and once again reap the tender life of the earth. He knew that the earth had become angry at them. She had became cold and harsh, turning her pretty face from them. She had become like a dead statue. She would not give them life, and, as life begets life, they could not stay there much longer. Tadej walked fast, he was aware that the food reserves in the cellar were diminishing fast. There were barrels of potatoes and apples, and many, many jugs of wine, but after another freezing winter it would all be gone, and soon after, they would all starve. This thought, the picture of his thick mother withering from hunger, made him walk with more determination. If he happened to pass another tradesman, he would ask them about their land, and if they knew the land which the sun had begun to favor.
He walked for three days until he found a train depot. He had never seen a train, but a couple of the market owners had told him of an invention that moved people and goods faster than the speediest horse. When he arrived in this town, larger and busier than any he had ever seen, it was a scene beyond anything he could imagine. The landscape was teeming, reminding him of the ant swarms he would watch as a young boy. The streets were chaotic. Horses, mules and humans morphed into an undulating crowd that heaved and pulsated with a never ceasing force.
He heard a sound in the far distance, a screeching whistle that roared through the town, the land, and his ears with a deafening force. As it grew louder with each second, he looked around for the source of this unnatural sound. A woman was passing by him just then and he grabbed her arm with a firm grip. She looked at him, shocked and stunned by this sudden assault on her free movement. "What is that sound, miss?" his voice revealing his fear. "It’s the train," she said and she pulled her arm free, fleeing from his grip. As she ran away from him, he felt the ground rumble under his feet. He winced and he heard the blood curdling sound of another long whistle. It was the beast, made of black metal, emitting smoke like a blood thirsty dragon. Perhaps it was his sense of impending doom, but he knew then that mounting this other worldly beast would deliver him to another world, it alone could take him to a new fertile land. As afraid as he was before this terrible apparition, he felt his blood rushing through his veins with a force he had never felt before, he felt himself become truly alive and glowing with reckless courage.
Tadej had been gone seven months and the family had not heard from him. His father, fearing the worst, had decided that the family could wait no longer, they would have to leave their land before Tadej sent for them. This winter had been the worst yet. The snow piled and piled, the winds never ceased. It took all their strength just to keep warm. The animals were dying without the grasses they had been accustomed to and the cold was only adding to their misery.
At the end of March, they bundled together all their most beautiful rugs, their photos and the small set of silver tea cups that had been a family heirloom. The grandmother gathered her bottles of salves and her collection of sketches, a lifetime of landscape drawings. Each family member gathered the few things they could not part with and they bundled it all onto their four mules and two horses and began to walk the single lane trail into town. Arriving at the closest town, Grandfather was stopped by his old friend who managed the post office. A letter from Tadej had arrived the previous night. It urged them to come "west." He had found a small piece of land. It was in the valley of a land called "Mexico." The family, excited and nervous, followed the same path he had walked out of town. They walked to the large city even further down the mountain and boarded the great dragon he warned them about in his letter. After five months of travel, the family was reunited with Tadej in the San Joaquin valley.
After only four months, Grandfather was found dead in his bed. He had been very old when they began the descent from the mountains of Slovenia. The train ride, the boat ride, and the second train across the vast land they had come to, it had all been very hard on his old tired body. He had been made tough by years of work in the fields, but his age had truly begun to show when the cold winters began. The thought that kept him alive on the journey was the thought of seeing the new piece of land. Every day, before rising, he thought of this new bright land that Tadej had written about. Gold land and gold light, where the earth thrives with abandon. This was what pushed him forward, it allowed him to move and breathe. Before he died, and he knew it was coming soon, he wanted to see this land that his grandson had discovered.
And when he did finally see the golden land that nestled in the soft contours of this new mysterious mountains, and he saw his family living again from the earth that was no longer angry at them but loved them as it had so many years ago, his body finally relaxed and it allowed himself to depart peacefully. They found him in the morning, cold and hard, with his eyes closed and his wrinkled face calm. Leaving aside the day chores, the remaining family members walked around the circumference of their new land, holding a small white candle and chanting very old prayers.
Tadej found a new tree on which to rest every day, up on a hill of soft dry grass and sliding dusty pebbles. From there, he could see that the world was new and he was getting old. He would soon become Grandfather, and his face would be full of wrinkles and his arms would be brittle and weak, and some day, sooner than he could expect it, it would be time again to die.