the immigrant

Galway was the loneliest city in the world.

The River Corrib was high and violent. The banks were laden with warning signs and life savers. The water was brown and white, swiftly rushing out to sea, where the swans--the reincarnated dead fishermen--rested on the comparatively flat ocean waters.

She retraced its never ceasing movement inland, until she got to a bridge she didn't feel like crossing.

The wedding was over and she now had 12 hours to kill before her flight to London. She was excited about the next leg of her trip. She wanted to see Big Ben. Buckinham Palace. Drink tea. She was tired of Ireland, of its crotchety provincialism, of the tourists who thought they had "come home", of the looks on the faces of the people when they asked her the time and she responded in an American accent, which she did not know was an accent until now.

The rest of the party was still sleeping or nursing their hangovers in the hotel bar. She was alone. No one knew where she was. She had not thought to tell anyone.

There were no rapids on this part of the river, the water was just high. She looked down into its depths and admired the broken bottles and other trash offered by Galway's residents and tourists.

She heard a voice behind her. She can not tell you know exactly what he said, but he invited her over to his house for tea and she accepted. Finally, after boring tour after boring tour of old, stale, crumbling dead things, she was having an adventure. In a foreign land. With a foreigner.

He was small and brown. Not Irish. I can take him, she thought, even as she told herself that, of course, this was a non-threatening, platonic engagement.

And then they left Galway, or at least, her old concept of it.

***

"I'm sorry, we do not serve baahgulls here." Their French waiter is getting annoyed. Their flight out of London will not be for another several hours and the family party is hungry. The airport cafe is not as accommadating as they had expected. They grudgingly provide their orders and the waiter turns on his heel. A relative eyes him as he prances up to another group of exhausted tourists. "I've never seen so many white people who don't speak English," he says.

***

It was a long walk, both physically and mentally. She had already wandered past the cheery, tourist-friendly downtown, the Corrib having led her to a more residential-type area. But even there it still looked like a postcard. The houses were lovely white stucco, with laundry hanging from the windows, flower pots in the sills, the front yards enclosed by prim wrought iron gates.

They moved past all that. The slim, sophisticated streets became a highway, as wide and ugly as anything you'd see in America. The strip malls looked exactly like the ones in her hometown. And the sagging bodies, loaded down with purchases, looked like the same people she saw everyday, the ones she thought she was escaping in this faraway, mythical land.

The immigrant's apartment was located in a nondescript suburban area that she did not recognize, but again, it could have been anywhere. They entered through an alley.

He locked the door behind him. Her panic annoys him. "See," he says, demonstrating. "I only lock it so my bike isn't stolen.

The small cramped quarters were about as messy as her own room. She looked at the table. It was littered with "how to speak english" pamplets. There were napkins scralled with numbers--dollar amounts. $1,000; $2,000...$100,000,000, these gradually getting smaller and smaller as though written with disbelief, as though written with knowledge that they could not be contained on this or any napkin.

"Where are you from?"

"Pakistan."

"What part?" As if she knew the geography of Pakistan.

He mentioned some village.

"Why are you here?"

He did not appear to want to answer this question. "The kind of person I am...life is very difficult for us there. I had to leave."

He served her tea. It was tan with milk and extremely sweet. She sipped politely, and then almost spat it out as she felt his hands on her knees.

"I want to give you a massage."

"What?"

"I love your face."

"What?"

"I love you."

"I...I have to go."

He is upset, offended. "I am not...a bad man."

***

She rushed hurriedly past this strange, other place, the place not in the guidebook. She wondered if these people, walking home from the shopping centre, if they would assume she was one of them, or if they would know. If they could smell it on her. She ran from his home the way blindly, hopping over concrete fences, suddenly noticing graffiti, dirty-faced children, things she was not ready to see.

No one had missed her. She had just taken a walk by herself. Nothing had happened.

an offer he couldn't refuse

Still smiling, the green man bowed, and bent
His head a bit, baring his neck,
His lovely long hair tossed back, leaving
The naked flesh open, exposed.
Gawain hefted the axe, swung it high
In both hands, balancing his left foot in front of him,
Then quickly brought it down. The blade
Cut through bones and skin and fair
White flesh, split the green man's neck
So swiftly that its edge slashed the ground.
and the head fell to the earth, rolled
On the floor, and the knights kicked it with their
feet:
The body spurted blood, gleaming
Red on green skin--but the green man stood
A moment, not staggering, not falling, then sprang
On strong legs and roughly reached through thrashing
Feet, claimed his lovely head,
And carrying it to his horse caught the bridle,
Stepped in the stirrups and mounted, holding
His head by its long green hair, sitting
High and steady in the saddle as though nothing
Had happened. But he sat there headless, for everyone
To see,
Twisting his bloody, severed
Stump. And the knights were wary,
Afraid before he ever
Opened that mouth to speak.
And he held that head high, slowly turning
Its face toward Arthur and the noblest of his knights,
And it lifted its lids and stared with wide eyes
And moved its lips and spoke, saying:
"Gawain, be ready to ride as you promised;
Hunt me well until you find me--
As you swore to, here in this hall, heard
By these knights. Find the green chapel, come
To take what you've given, a quick and proper
Greeting for a New Year's Day. Many men
Know the knight of the green chapel:
Seek me, and nothing can keep you from me.
Then come! or be called a coward forever."
With a violent rush he turned the reins
And galloped from the hall, his head in his hands;
His horse's hooves struck fire on the stone.
And where he rode to no one knew,
No more than they'd known from where he came.

-- Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (lines 417-461)

sometimes you read the exact right thing at the exact right time

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

kids on the corner, 1994

go pick daddy up at work.

drive through a new place: the bad neighborhood.

good neighborhood. bad neighborhood. big neighborhood. small neighborhoood. orange neighborhood. blue neighborhood. nay. borrr. hood.

you laugh at all the things your mother told you back then.

and you see all the kids on the corner. run across the street to their friends on their corner.

you will never see them again. they will never look like this again. the laughter hooting wildly out of their darkness. their faces look at you as you drive past. curls. braids. two girls holding hands. baby strollers. now you're just inventing things because you can't remember...

everything is gone. the smell in the air. you. you so young.

all times are not the same. they will never feel the same. our generalizations about "life experiences" make us believe this lie. the air was different when your parents were young. and even stranger, even more unfathomable, is the air of our grandparents and our parents' parents, in no small part because movies and television and bad novelists have ruined our appreciation for what was lost.

you're an old fart now. you don't get the kids these days. their music. their clothes. and they're all inside now on the devices you haven't really adapted to because you were on the cusp, you still remember the pre-internet jurassic era.

you remember when the kids hung out on the corner. the big kids. the kids you feared. and the sound in the air, the sound of that insignificant little blip of a generation, crushed under the weight of the babyboomers, but you can still find it today in the electronic catacombs and it makes you ache with loss and nostalgia and all the wonder of being young in a car in a bad neighborhood in 1994...

thoughts on eating

I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant fact, stated by entomologists, I find it in Kirby and Spence, that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with organs of feeding, make no use of them;" and they lay it down as "a general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed into a butterfly," .. "and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly," content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larvae. This is the tid-bit which tempts his insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larvae state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. 

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

kids on the corner, 1992

the compound, part 5

He followed her footsteps all the way back to her family's cabin.

They saw the bruises, the black eye--and the blood. She was not pregnant. She had proof.

It was decided that it was all a terrible mistake. They had judged too soon. Different tactics were called for.

Of course, they must remain married. They must remain together.

But, then, they were still children,

It was decided that they need A Year in the World.

***

They got jobs working at Walmart.

He was suspicious. Why was she laughing and talking so much now? Did she not understand that these pigs were constantly making fun of her? In front of her stupid fish face.

He was frightened around these oafs in their strange, shaggy clothes. Their coarse language, worse than anything he had ever heard his father say in his most drunken state.

But he could not help notice that Fish Face was attracted to them. He had never seen what he looked like before. He had always assumed that he resembled his father. He did. But, he realized, he was not handsome.

He could not blame Fish Face for being attracted to these evil lads. And he hated her the more for it.

***

They took her out to the parking lot. The two invited him along. A third, a stranger, uglier than them, held a video camera. "For the grandkids," he leered, placing the camera in his hands. "The red button."

What came over him? He took hold of it, pressed it.

At first, he laughed. At first they tried to all go at once. But they did not like touching each other and she struggled too much. And the one with the camera kept accidentally erasing the footage of their clumsy, botched entanglements.

The finally shoved him aside and made the ugly one hold the camera, while A took his position at her mouth, and B at her rear. In her rear.

He and the camera watched as they violated her. Her body, with their sexes. Her soul, with that strange device that captured and held you in its own universe for all of eternity. Humiliated. Broken. She was opened again. Wider ever than his mother was. With this camera and these ruffians of the New World, he was spreading her wider than he or any man on the compound could ever dream.

He gasped as she screamed and wondered that she did not bit down on the lad in her mouth, though he was so far down her throat she probably could not have done much damage if she tried.

His arousal mixed with horror as they went at it, rutting mercilessly like unfeeling bulls. He could see blood trickling down her thigh as B plowed away. A fucked her mouth as though it were nothing but a cunt. Disgusting noises emitted from this hole, like slop before swine. He supported this unceasing motion by holding her skull up by fistfulls of her golden hair. Her face was red. Her body limp. He could not see her eyes.

They finished inside of her. They pulled out and let her fall to the ground. A discarded doll. C had him hold the camera and zoom in to a close up of him jerking off over her lifeless body and ejaculating on her face.

"On that Amish bitches face!"

"Fish face."

"What?"

They got theirs in first, but he still had time to make his mark.

"That's her name," he ejaculated.

The others shrugged their shoulders, wiping their dicks in her hair.

"Alright, we'll call it Fish Face's first time. What the fuck. Dude, we're going to make some much money."

***

They did not make any money, or at least he assumed they didn't, because they continued to work at Walmart. They went on with their lives.

He and Fish Face ended their year in the world nine months early. When she returned to her family, she was already showing. There was much rejoicing and fawning over the stomach bulge, and his father even placed a strong, tender hand on his shoulder. These displays of approval of his nonexistent fertility did not perturb him, did not make him bitter.

He felt what they felt, but stronger and deeper. He felt proud of something beyond himself. Even if they would consciously disagree, he knew that he had more than met the accomplishment they imagined in their minds.

They were no longer banished to the hut; both families had come together to help prepare them a proper home in the center of the compound. His father offered to show the young couple to their new abode, but he refused. He took Fish Face's arm and led her from the gathering.

They arrived at the house just as the sun was setting. The light dipped low over the tobacco fields, burning their green leaves red. The smell of spring was in the air, as was the delicious smell of stew cooking over open fires.  He inhaled deeply and walked onto the porch, his porch.

She was staring at the sun. For an instant he felt a tinge of that old anxiety from that past summer, so long ago now, but did not let is take hold. He knew better now. He lifted her into his arms. He did not care to speak to her face; she did not even have a face to him now, she was just "Fish."

But just to make sure, he took one last look as he hoisted her body over the threshold. And in those black squid pools of nothing he saw something that put him forever at ease.

She was ready to be a wife now.

the compound, part 4

The wedding took place with little ceremony.

They were unofficially banished from the compound.

They were granted a little plot of land, far from the tobacco fields.

The soil was rocky.

That summer was the most miserable of his life. How many hours did he spent breaking his back with the human-drawn plow? Sweating under the scorch of the angry, dry sun. Not once did she leave the shade of the house to offer him a cool drink of water. And in the evening, after he had cooled his body with healing water from the pail, did she offer her body for comfort.

She did not cook.

She did not clean.

Nor did her body betray that hideous act in the woods, now four months past. He began to think that he had been fooled. By his father, he could not blame her. He could not blame her, and it made the hatred for her seethe.

An image of those times haunts him years later: Fish Face standing in the doorway watching him. He had never felt such discomfort as when his back was turned to her and he knew, deeply, in his bones, that she was still staring. Staring.

September. Now harvest time. He would really need her help from now on. She could not stare sullenly out of windows and doorways for the next few crucial weeks. But he knew not to raise his voice to her--he knew the noneffect that would have.

No, it was time to take her again.

"Sarah, it's time for you to help with the harvest."

No answer. She was a mute thing in the doorway. All eyes and stiff mouth.

He flew at her.

She knew.

He chased her through the house, out the back door, into the brush separating them from the compound. He tackled her to the ground and she ceased movement. He tried to turn her over to face him, but she hung limp. He thought, again, that perhaps she was dead, that he had killed her. He laughed at himself for thinking such ridiculous thoughts.

"Fine, have it your way."

As he rutted her from behind, it suddenly occurred to him what the end result of all this would be. Perhaps she is not with child yet. Perhaps it is not too late. It's been so long and, still, a belly as flat and barren as this field. But, so soon...

He ejaculated on her dress.

He gazed down at her. Limp but alive, she was. What was she looking at?

We are tied together.

And again, he felt the urge to weep. This time he did not conceal the urge, but bellowed openly, hysterically, like a mother who has just lost a child.

Fish Face did not cry. She did not blink. Those eyes, those black liquid squid eyes, stared past him, past his point of vision, into some beyond, some unfathomable chasm that would never merge, never heal.

Finally, he threw a hoe at her. The sharp end struck her face and she started.

"The harvest," he blubbered.

thoughts for the Fall Fashion season

When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they,"-- "It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulrders, as it were a peg to hang a coat on? We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same. [....]

 On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. ....Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable.

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. ...as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.

-- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

the girl and the Flight from Feeling

So I finished a big, dumb book called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a.k.a., "Men Who Hate Women" or something equally profound. Salander, the title's namesake (she is not really the protagonist--more like the James Bond-esque financial reporter's (lulz aplenty) taciturn sidekick), has received widespread praise as a "badass" and "basically a feminist avenger."

While I'm no card-carrying member of the F*eminists, I don't think this is a very feminist book, nor a tome that can be considered life-affirming for any species on this planet. And I'm not just saying that because this is a book carelessly littered with tortured, raped and, frequently, dead, bodies. I'm not saying that just because it's an all-around stinky book from the more depoliticized standpoints of style and intellect. Well, maybe I'm saying that a little--this guy gets it:



No, I do not have the authority for such takedowns. (Plus, it's already been done superbly here). To give voice to my critique, which concerns the main characters' sexual relationship, I'm turning to an old fossil:

The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress. The progressive ideology of "nonbinding commitments" and "cool sex" makes a virtue of emotional disengagement, while purporting to criticize the depersonalization of sex. Enlightened authorities like Alex Comfort, Nena and George O'Neill, Robert and Anna Francoeur insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a "total experience" instead of a mechanical performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry "romantic illusions." "Radical" therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve--since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy--but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them. This program seeks to allay emotional tensions, in effect, by reducing the demands men and women make on each other, instead of making men and women better able to meet them. The promotion of sex as a "healthy," "normal" part of life masks a desire to divest it of the emotional intensity that unavoidably clings to it: the remainders of earlier entanglements with parents, the "unhealthy" inclination to re-create those relations in relation with lovers. The enlightened insistence that sex is not "dirty" expresses a wish to sanitize it by washing away its unconscious associations.

-- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism 

Among other odious things, Girl is a book about Blomkvist, Swedish "superstud" journalist, and his three Neapolitan scoops: post-menopausal Cecilia, forty-something Berger, and our titular, "anorexic," "childlike" heroine. Blomkvist is such a swell guy that he fucks them all and does not think of them. They, however, think about him a lot. Cecilia has to end their affair after she falls in love with him. And while Berger plays the foxy adultress--complete with an "agreement" with the husband--we never hear about her seeking satisfaction from other men. The only scene that includes her husband describes her pretending to be asleep as he climbs into bed with her. Salander (Salamander?), an arm chair psychologist's Asperger's case, fucks him more months before suddenly realizing her feelings. She buys him a godawful Elvis souvenir and rushes to his apartment to declare her love...just in time to see Berger and Blomkvist getting there at the same time to have the same casual sex they've been having for twenty years. Ouch!--massive butthurtness (oh wait, she already had some of that before...). I assume the next book describes her cliched revenge in detail.

That said, I will be reading both sequels in the future...because I suffer from low self-esteem and poor decision-making skills.

after everything, this is your life now

You hurry out of the bp and run straight smack into one of the mysterious people you spend your working hours emailing but have never seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched in person.

Or do you?

It could be just another Creature from Middle Management from some far-off, exotic department you are unaware of. There is no way of knowing. This is an international corporation, after all, and you are a very small cog in the immense machine.

But how fitting it would be for one of your contacts to see you like this right after you've sent them one of your brief missives of barely-concealed rage.

Your left eye has welled up due to the perpetual coughing fit you've been suppressing all morning. A large tear rolls down the bridge of your nose.

The stranger offers you a perplexed look before hurrying on her way.

She thinks I've been crying. 

You continue your coughing fit in the office kitchen.

sandra cisneros

Is it possible to die of nostalgia? I felt the possibility coming on while reading the first section of Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek, entitled "My Friend Lucy Who Smells Like Corn."

I mean it in the best possible sense.

I've already openly swooned over one of the most gorgeous short stories ever written, "Salvador Late or Early," but I want to go on record with my love for the whole series of vignettes. Each page unfolds a new secret that reveals the sweet pain of childhood, from sharing wonder with Lucy at the "yellow blood of butterflies" to Salvador's "memory of kites" to the immortal battle between the humiliated child and the all-knowing teacher in "Eleven."Each of these pieces woke up some buried emotion in me, something both eternally joyful and inexpressibly sad. A butterfly emerging from the chrysalis and dying an hour later. That is childhood. It's a truth you can die from if you're not careful.

Cisneros could not be more different from Hempel. Where Hempel is cool, Cisneros is warm. Where Hempel is dry and sardonic, Cisneros is lively and ecstatic. I almost regret writing the later statements, as they grossly simplify the two women's work, however, I don't think it's incorrect to allow that each writer colors in her own hue. Nevertheless, I believe that both writers employ a technique of withholding that allows their stories to soar. I don't know what any of the characters in Reasons to Live or "My Friend Lucy" look like. Yes, The House on Mango Street has cute little sections about the family's varying pelitos, but this is still in accordance with the unspoken rule of keeping descriptions spare and salient. Everything included in the story is supposed to *mean* something.

Another thing I like about Cisneros is that she lets us know her. She cares about the state of the world. And damn but does she know how to take a good publicity photo:

Work it, girl! And thank you for your wonderful, wonderful words.

the compound, part 3

After it was done, he sat down on the log to catch his breath, to prevent the tears, to plan what to say, do. When he had settled enough to face her again, he stood up again.

But she was gone.

Fish Face! he almost screamed into the darkness. "Sarah, Sarah," he barked instead. He could see the cabins in the distance. Was that a light flickering on? Now was not the time for words. He felt with his hands. Only branches and bushes and creepy crawly things that bite.

The whore.

He stopped at the outhouse before sneaking back inside.

His father was sitting on the bed in the darkness. He started, a yelp choked back by terror. He could see the massive shoulders, the yellow beard glinting in the moonlight. He couldn't move as this dark shadow moved towards him. He was like the hypnotized prey of a cobra.

He shook as the hands came towards him. He closed his eyes, unable to bear the sight of the godless face  slowly becoming illuminated in front of him. He did not see. He did not breathe. He did not feel the crushing weight of those hands. He could barely comprehend the weight of the single word.

"Who?"

  ***

They paid her family a visit. Before breakfast. Bad form. The mother, red-faced from standing over the large cast-iron pot, a flappy, pale-yellow bonnet hurriedly plopped over her graying hair. She poked her bulbous red snout out at them suspiciously. Company did not come at this time on weekdays.

"Why, it's the Duggins. And so early..." She squinted her mean eyes. "But it's just the father and his lad, eh?" Her smile turned crooked on one side. She always spoke with that stupid accent, he thought. Her husband stole her away from across the sea, or so they said.

"Well, come in."

The father was sitting by the fire, administering the bible lesson to the one male heir. The girls, the majority, were fussing about breakfast, clattering plates down, flicking spoonfuls of porridge at each other.

"Girls! Come set the table proper. We have guests."

They admittedly quieted down, embarrassed, resuming their womanly duties with a subdued air. All, he thought, except Fish Face. She looked him in the eye without flinching. She walked over to the other side of the room to fetch a pitcher of cream. He watched her straight, sure back, not so lumpy as he had thought before. She must be dumb, he thought. She must not Know.

 ***

There was no place for him. Fish Face was sequestered off to perform more household tasks with her sisters. The father and mother talked in strained low voices with Yellow Beard. The lone son sat near the adults, reading his bible upside down.

No one said anything to him, asked anything of him, offered anything to him. He was neither a guest, nor a servant. He did not exist and yet he was the center of it all. He had never felt so pathetic and important at the same time.

He watched Fish Face drawing water from the well, the overflowing bucket sploshing wildly. One of the younger girls tugged at her sleeve impatiently. Fish Face turned the bucket on her. The young brat ran screaming for her mother and the other girls giggled hysterically.

His eyes rested on her triumphant hyena's body. Whereas before he had seen it as merely soft, sagging flesh, he now saw robustness. Her flesh was literally bursting out of her clothes. The adolescent garb looked tawdry on her young woman's body. Her ample bosom, belly and buttocks strained against the stubborn calico to the point of loose threads in some places. Her cheeks were ruddy with activity. The bonnet, scandalously loose, betrayed those ever-orange curls, which he now saw glinted handsomely in the sunshine.

She met his gaze, briefly and without the slightest betrayal of emotion. Then she turned back to her sisters' merriment.

All their hair was orange, he realized. The color of an old sun. It could have been any of them. Any of them.

He knew it was all ending. He knew he would never see the sun setting past the rows of green tobacco leaves again, or at least they would never look the same again. He cringed when he thought of his brothers. He would be nothing to them now. And how could they be warned? They would not be. One by one, they would commit the same error, just as all their fathers before them. A catastrophe barely present for, a passing fancy, an evil they did not have the passion to be truly committed to. And the dark figure would wait on their bed like a knife after the strange dream they thought they had woken from, waiting in judgment to demand "Who?"

lucy & quentin do it (lucy's first time)

salvador late or early

quoted in full because it makes me cry:

Salvador with eyes the color of caterpillar. Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth, Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember, is a boy who is no one's friend, runs along somewhere in that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather, lives behind a raw wood doorway, shakes the sleepy brothers awake, ties their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds them milk and corn flakes from a tin cup in the dim dark of the morning.

Salvador, late or early, sooner or later arrives with the string of younger brothers ready. Helps his mama, who is busy with the business of the baby. Tugs the arms of Cecilio, Arturito, makes them hurry, because today, like yesterday, Arturito has dropped the cigar box of crayons, has let go the hundred little fingers of red, green, yellow, blue, and nub of black sticks that tumble and spill over and beyond the asphalt puddles until the crossing-guard lady holds back the blur of traffic for Salvador to collect them again.

Salvador inside that wrinkled shirt, inside the throat that must clear itself and apologize each time it speaks, inside that forty-pound body of boy with its geography of scars, its history of hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags, in what part of the eyes, in what part of the heart, in that cage of the chest where something throbs with both fists and knows only what Salvador knows, inside that body too small to contain the hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar of grief, is a boy like any other disappearing out the door, beside the schoolyard gate, where he has told his brothers they must wait. Collects the hands of Cecilio and Arturito, scuttles off dodging the many schoolyard colors, the elbows and wrists criss-crossing, the several shoes running. Grows small and smaller to the eye, dissolves into the bright horizon, flutters in the air before disappearing like a memory of kites. 

from Sandra Cisneros's Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories

the compound, part 2

His father was a tall man with a yellow beard. He smelled of musk and spent most of his days out in the field with the other men.

"A woman is like this," his father told him as he penetrated a shallow layer of earth with his hoe. "Just like this."

He missed those days. At nights now, in a strange bed faraway, he wakes up crying, remembering the sunset over the fields. The shadows cast by the tobacco plant. His father's voice and musk.

Like everyone else on the compound, they lived in a one room cabin. So when the time came, it was not a matter of what but of how. He knew the man was above, silent, powerful, steady, unyielding. And the woman, underneath, somewhere, invisible beneath all the motion and disturbed blankets. Her presence a series of grunts wavering between surprise and despair. As his father came, these sounds reached crescendo in an unbearably sweet moan of loss--something very precious had been finally released. Like a child.

In the morning, his father was ruddy and sweat-sodden. He whistled as he splashed the ice water over his hairy face. His mother, also red-faced, but quiet, She had been opened again.

It was around this time, the time that the large trundle bed he shared with his three brothers became too small, that he began to notice Fish Face. That was not her real name, of course, and thankfully not a nickname, either. It was how he thought of her in his head about that amorphous female, all eyes and mouth. Carrot curls peeking out from beneath a rose-bud bonnet. A soft, lumpy body encased in those confused, voluminous garments designated for the not-quite girl, not-yet woman.

"What do you think of..." he had asked the boys one evening in the fields. It was autumn. The sun set behind the tobacco fields and left a coolness in its wake. They needed to finish the harvest before the frost set in.

"Eh," said one, shrugging his shoulders. "Eh," said another, and the subject was soon changed by the other. She was, you see, not a pretty or bad girl. Sometimes, with a shudder, he realized that you couldn't tell if she was a girl from a distance. "Yeah, just a sack of potatoes," he said out loud without thinking. The others halted their conversation and stared at him. "I'd rather be on my knees digging for taters than look at another damn tobaccer plant." The others rejoined in a collective guffaw. He turned back to his work.

That night he threw the stones at her window in the dark.

thoughts on my labor day weekend

I don't get used to living at the beach, to seeing that wet horizon. It's the edge, the country's aisle seat. But if you made me tell the truth, I'd have to say it's not a good thing. The people who live here, what you hear them say is I'm supposed to, I'll try, I would have.

There is no friction here.

It's a kind and buoyant place.

What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.

from "Tonight is a Favor to Holly" by Amy Hempel

the compound, part 1

She smelled like her mother. They looked the same. It was already hard to tell the women apart around here, and those two, well, they were mirror images give or take 15 years. They both wore calico dresses cut from the same pattern: pink checkered squares. And their hair piled on top of their heads like rising dough.

Like fresh baked bread, they smelled. That yeasty smell. He always liked that. Not like how the boys said it would smell, like how he heard his father joking with other men one drunken night, like rotten fish.

That's what he will remember most about those days. Those hours spent in the middle of the night, the deepest darkest hour, when he could breathe to hope that his brother's lying next to him were asleep or at least ashamed enough to pretend to sleep when they heard him thinking about Sarah. Those nights with his brother's snores, and the rain on the roof and hot mouth dreams of Sarah, who smelled like bread.

He's throwing rocks at her window. Small pebbles. They hit the glass with a tinny whisper, like secret pieces of flint.

Now they are in the woods.

She looks at him with those big wet fish eyes. Like a squid's, he thinks wonderingly. The last time he saw her he was stupid enough to tell her this and she stormed off crying. Now she is back and he doesn't say anything, just looks at her. Looks at her face, all eyes and mouth.

He is a gentleman. He takes her by the hand and leads her further into the dark deep. It occurs to him that he might get lost in this darkness. It is so dark. He trips over a fallen log. He can feel her looking at him. He turns around and sees her fish face by moonlight, smiling up at him. This annoys him for some reason that he cannot name and this unknowingness makes him angry. He turns her around, presses her face into a tree and lifts her skirt up.

She is soft and impassive under his hands, like dough. He kneads her breasts through the calico and immerses his face in the soft pile of hair. He drinks the aroma and slides in, easily and without resistance.  Too easy. He tangles his fingers in her hair an presses her face harder into the rough bark. He yanks her back by the hair. Her mouth drops open like a kewpie doll.

"Mmmnaaagh." An uncomfortable grunt. At the limit of his frustrations, he stabs upward, hoisting her up  on his sex, dragging her face against the trunk. She screams. He clamps his hand over her mouth and begins to ride her, slowly and then with gathering sureness. She bellows like a breaking horse beneath him.

But just when he was getting there, when he was reaching his moment of glory, he gets lost in her. He was going so fast and strong, pulling out so far and driving in that much deeper, that he was not even aware of her anymore, did not know what tunnel he was running in. He flopped out and could not get back in before it was too late and he was soft and sticky against her filth, that place of exit so impertinently close to the assigned entrance.

He hears her sigh low and he wants to cry.

lucy wakes up

the house of tomorrow

from The Prophet

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

 For they may have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,  which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.