Cuentos

 The dark red pores of the worn leather chair looked wet, looked like blood soaking in, looked like red wine ruining an otherwise perfectly easy white grape evening. The cowboy was chewing, the cowboy was chewing and his cheek was distended with tobacco and spit. Dana, Danalynn, Delaney Marie, depending on when you asked her, what age what incarnation, shuddered and considered the implications of spilled wine, drunken cowboys, and her mother coming home in the middle of what might be described as a another bad judgment phase of her life. Delaney, Laney, Dana Marie, my little Marybell, I am so disappointed in you, mama would say. Laney wiped up the spilled wine, emptied the ashtrays, and put mama to bed. Cowboy too, if she had to.

But Ma, guess what I got in my hand? Laney would say and would hold out a wad of tobacco, a wad of wrong living, a wad of judgment that her mother would chew on for months in the informal group that passed for therapy after the money was all gone.

Ma, what I got in my hand is the future, Laney would say. She’d been doing this since she was little, since the first time Laney realized that the moving, the dance, the constant changing from place to place  all meant something about loneliness and terror, the loneliness and terror of her young mom. Laney held her mother’s fear in her hand like a sphere, a round smooth ball of palm-warmed glass. There was peace and rest in mama’s fear, a vocabulary of calming that she spooned into mama’s mouth like warm milk to a kitten’s mew.

Laney had a cat once, a little cat who lived under the front steps of a trailer house down the street. Little cat had kittens, even though she was barely grown herself. Laney crawled under the steps with a can of food bank tuna, which was greasy and smelled of diesel oil, but little cat went for it and came with her, kittens and all, in a box with an old cotton dish cloth. She quickly became a tame kitty with babies that tore at her adolescent nipples and sucked her thin and dry, even with all the canned tuna Laney could divert from their own weekly supply. Laney personally hated food bank tuna and even the smell of it made her gag, but there were things she would do for baby cat that she was not willing to do for herself.

The kittens grew into cats and ate like cats and ate and ate until their belly skin was tight and round. Laney realized that each little mouth was going to generate more little mouths and that her own regenerative capacities as regards tuna would probably not be able to keep up with demand. About that time, mama packed their bags, taking Laney and little cat but leaving the kittens, the furniture and the cowboy all lying in tobacco spit and tuna juice, and they moved someplace clean and new.

The clean new place was small, in a biggish city that started with a vowel. Layney was pretty sure the name of the city was an Indian name, a first peoples name, and she got out her book about first people and the story her first daddy had told her about his people, we are from this people and that, all the way back to the turtle clan and the very first people of all. She imagined herself riding on the turtle’s back for hundreds of years, never being bored at all. Turtle time is very different than people time, she can hear her father’s voice telling her in the voice of his people, his old turtle clan. She thinks the name of her first father is George, but this is not something she can talk to mama about, even on the best days, even when there is no stinking cowboy buying the beer and helping ma lose her job again.

When she was liittle, Laney thought, didn’t they go to the zoo sometimes? She thought they went to the zoo when she was young, and at the zoo her favorite time of day was when the zookeepers brought out the different kinds of food for each different kind of animal. Hay, pellets, seeds, mangoes, beef, smelt, lettuce, tiny mice with pink eyes. Everybody eats something, mama said, and gave her some pellets to feed to the ducks. The ducks fought and bit each other. Laney preferred the flamingos, standing steady on their backward elbows, and the otters, who made every bite look like a fantastic joke, no matter who they were eating.

In the imaginary jungle where Laney wandered at night after sleep took her out of the very small place, the cowboy lived far away, and the animals who shook and rattled her sleeping cage were drawn broad, some of them even in crayon with little glitter bits filling in the details where she wasn’t exactly sure how a rhino’s tusk should be drawn. The imaginary jungle did not have a smell, not at all like the zoo or the apartment with the burned carpet and the molding beer smell, or the motel with the scented dispenser that shot springtime freshness out into the room automatically every twenty minutes. Laney lay in bed some nights, listening to the scent dispenser release like clockwork, a springtime disinfectant bouquet that sat in the back of her throat. Mama came home late, smelling like smoke, roulette nerves and fried food, and that mixed in with the springtime and tobacco spit memory. Those smells made Laney think of luck and the cowboy. The cowboy had liked to play the lottery, punching in Laney’s special numbers, telling her Laney, you’re a winner, you’ll see. You’ll see.

In the spring, Uncle Pig burned leaves, while the ground was still damp and fire was relatively safe. Never in the fall, when the autumn leaves would burn crisp and fast, like when he was a boy and he and his cousins experimented with a soft dry patch out back that rose on a light breeze like a breath from a dying man, up and out into some destination that they hoped would remain unknown. It became known altogether too fast, a short jump from their own 5 acres to the center of town and then down to the river, where thank god it put itself out. That incident was long out of public memory until it happened again, some 50 years later.

Uncle Pig did not get re-elected to village council that year, on account of the fire, and in fact his picture was eventually removed from the Town Hall offices, where every elected official was hanging, except for the dog catcher who was found to have sold many missing dogs to a cosmetics research lab, and now Uncle Pig, who tried not once but repeatedly to burn the village down to the ground. This burning desire was eventually found to be related to a small but powerful tumor in the right temporal lobe that convinced Uncle Pig that the only truly cleansing substance on earth is fire. Fire leaves nothing but sterile ash in its wake, he told his attorney, at the trial where he was not allowed to testify. For his entire 73 years, he woke every morning, lit the fire, made the coffee, and got to work. Every spring, he burned leaves in the recommended manner, until the year when he lit the fire in October, to purify, to sanctify, to leave a pile of ashes where everything he used to know could be carried away, lightly, on the wind.

 How it was, or how it was bound to have started, I guess, or maybe I know or maybe it isn’t even true at all (they say I lie, they say I lie all the time – do I know if they are telling the truth or not? - I don’t know).

It was bound to have started, as they say, on the same page. There we were, all of us, on the same page, in the middle of this uncanny medieval fully realized dog and pony show.  Ladies with purple implanted contact lenses and breasts so light and separated they were practically meringue. On the day the crews arrived, there was a merenge band and a procession, and then the pagan crowds and extras attended masses and tasted the unintentional solace of cream, a golden orb, a reconversion, a moment of voluptuous forgetfulness with penance on top.  

So it was like this, the beginning of this story, which took place on a set and was therefore not real even in its beginnings, and the cast was a cast of characters that lived both on and off the set and there were beginnings, endings, and continuations. There were masks throughout, masks assigned by directors, masks assigned by convention and the agreed upon.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it was a yet another remake of Frankenstein, directed by (say) Kenneth Branagh, and let’s say it is cast with a dozen high-dollar stars. On this morning, the camera glides and turns and hovers over gothic stone and tumbling water falling over statuary in a grey English garden where everyone’s skin is chapped. The skin of Our Star is chapped and she is absolutely diva mad, diva mad. A local boy runs to the village apothecary and brings back a substandard brand of chapstick and a tub of udder cream at the recommendation of the storekeeper, which causes hooting and mooing and a general heightening of awareness that no-one much likes this particular diva, although of course with that bright white skin and the translucent eyebrows she is absolutely the right bride for this particular wedding.

After that, there is a shift in the ranks. In the gaffs and grips and best boys and best girls and extras and sandwich bringers there is a presentiment of death, and filming moves into the time of a crazy moon, shining iridescent, from some angles shining blood red, from others a wet, untouchable white, shimmering in damp English air.

The girl has been wearing her peasant costume for a week now and has begun to believe in herself. Her vowels stretch and flatten, and she has started chewing on her consonants, like some old weaving woman from central casting. She is much petted and pampered; this is the girl who put the udder cream in a small ceramic jar with a picture of zaftig sirens dancing in a pinkish white circle all round the edges. The cool cream sooths the diva’s skin, and the girl photographs well. The filming continues and the villagers light their torches and roam the streets just a little lit by the extra ale the film work is bringing them, and altogether the village and the film crew feel that things are as they ought to be. Fish’n’chips, yes, ale, yes, pretty girls with floating bosoms, yes. Plenty of things to slap one’s knees about over a pipe in the Fox n Swallow with your mates.

When things happen and there is a budget several times larger than the annual GDP of a small struggling country, sometimes people forget who they are. Which is to say that when it all started, back there as I was saying, there was no actual attempt to murder either the boy or the girl, who were only extras in the village that isn’t a village, the village that is a set of strong lights gathered around an ancient stone building, where villagers lit their torches and then the children were burned truly and spectacularly by the masses, who discovered method acting that day, what with the ale and the witchy moon and the presentiment of death.

Unless of course I am lying about the whole thing, which is what I’ve been told and which I’m not sure that I believe or don’t. I do have the sense that I was an extra, too, or actually that I am an extra still.  There was the mob scene, then the blind bearded fellow, then the little girl (who was too old for the part, I told them, but see nobody listens to me particularly). And next thing you know you’re packed in the back of a truck and hauled off to somewhere safe. Or maybe you’re just disappeared, looking for a fresh  costume, one without the ashes and blood, or a vehicle that can drive in the darkness outlining the ring of strong lights around the stone and the bonfire, or looking for some exit from this airless place where you’ve gone to examine the changes, the gloss, the notes on the edges of this page.

(**Thank you, Two for Tuesdays, for the writing prompt.**)

It is summer, April sweating in June with Marybess, Daniel, Jimbo and me all at the lake, eating watermelon. Jim’s brother, little Bob, is sitting in a tube with watermelon pink staining his 7 year old belly.

April and Marybess are having a contest: Find the best looking boy walking by, make him look at you, make him gape and bobble his head like a brown felt bulldog on a rear window shelf. Make him do it without appearing to notice him at all. Daniel, Jimbo and I are the unbiased judges of their success.

Boy number four and his friend, number seven (a cruel and inconsistent rating system has gone into effect) wander by. A few blotchy red spots and protuberant wrist bones on big boy hands, but good hair and “nice smiles,” all agree.  Good enough for practice.

Number four and number seven wander self-consciously onto the lake’s edge and stand there looking pink and naked as shellfish. April and Marybess are pulling on the edges of their suits, arranging assorted body parts and getting out sunscreens and lip glosses.  Four scratches his neck; seven roars into the water suddenly and bravely, soaking little Bob. Bob yells caca-head loser insults at them. They are bobbing along in the water now, rocking in imaginary waves in the greenish shallow lake.

Boy number one appears suddenly, the undisputed god of seventh grade summer beach vacation, in the water near four and seven. He’s a nut brown boy with long new muscles and green eyes. Even from the shore, the girls can see his eyelashes, heavy and sparkling with lake water. He and numbers four and seven rush each other, dunking in and out of the water, ignoring April and Marybess altogether, in a frenzy of pretty boy time.

Later at the bonfire, where youth counselors are inattentive and slightly stoned, Jim, Daniel and pretty boys one, seven and four share their pilfered beer and watch the girls, sitting in the firelight, bobbing their heads, sweating lightly, surprised. Little Bob sits separate from them all, spitting watermelon seeds through the gap, where a front tooth is missing, into the fire.

“Parlez-vous Arabic?” Peter Heffalump asks a sailor staggering by in the broken port town where he’d washed up after some serious blackout binging. Padre Heffalump, he’d been until recently, but defrocked now, stained and desperate. Peter Heffalump is disgraced, and in keeping with tradition had gone off the deep end with someone’s credit card, perhaps even his own priestly Mastercard. Way over the limit. Too far to fix it with prayer, and how is it that confession and forgiveness is not the same thing as keeping your job, Peter wonders. He is stained and greasy with the remains of his deconversion. He is not a priest anymore, just some schlub in a foreign country without papers and very much in need of a desk job in which to hide his shame.

Oh shame, Peter said to himself in English, Arabic, French and Lakota. Shame, the smoke that follows the burning bush, the revelation of sin. Sin is smoking, sin is a shakin’ groove thing forbidden to the hierophant and the Igors who serve him. “I kiss your ring, excellency,” says Peter. He imagines the ring sliding on and tightening ever so slightly and then kicks himself – stop it. Like water off a duck’s back, he tells himself, just let it go, but the image of the ring stays with him through one sermon after another.

Peter Heffalump is a poor sad overachiever, a hypochondriac and a toady. His best friend, Penelope Resin, came with him to seminary disguised as a boy and that was maybe an omen, amen. She didn’t stay long and sent him a dagger with her name engraved on the handle, and he had that dagger still, for just in case, just in case. Peter and Penelope ran with the fast crowd in soda shops after school in a mythical fifties that they saw at the drive-in and then in movies of the drive-in and the mythical fifties and then on sitcoms of the travails of teenagers at drive-ins in the mythical fifties until the broken record of pop culture created I like Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike and eventually they believed in it, so much like organized religion, like the blind faith of supply side economics. Peter believed everything he read, heard or saw. He was the most gullible of cultural consumers. Making Peter into a priest was like taking candy from a baby, easy, sweet, and him just looking up innocent and warm, apple pie and caramel, with ice cream melting at just the right moment.

Guilt is a fine thing, and shapely. From genuflection to pop-n-lock to shuck-n-jive to the gyrating pelvis of Elvis and the soul train of priesthood, Peter had a secret that he kept from himself, tightly wrapped in unbleached muslin and pressed against his chondriac. Once in a while he felt it as a pain near his solar plexis, which made him pause, words like plexis, words like solar, words like soap on a rope, slippery in the shower. Peter was prone to absent-minded reflections on sin, which seemed harmless enough until the day that the genie was released and then Peter lost his job, his calling, his address and some of his working vocabulary in several languages.

What would you do? Meditate? Pray? Call your mother? Peter had been a pastoral counselor and tried to give himself advice, but the language of guidance had gone missing along with the guide book and the page he so wanted to be on. A page we can all agree on, he said to himself, sitting in the noisy African port where the smells were so heavy, so spicy and dirty and raw. Back to dry land, must get back to dry land, he muttered, picturing himself as Peter O’Toole, dry-lipped and romantic. So he called Penelope, she of the secret priesthood and the dagger and asked her for airfare home and a couch to sleep on.

And now he is in Oakland, with the window open in her second floor apartment, and outside the air is damp and cool and he hears the sounds of neighborhood. This is a regular city neighborhood, American style. There is barking, a TV sound, the beeping of a truck backing up, an unknown bird trilling somewhere nearby. His heart is a sound too, a rolling, repetitive diadochochinetic sound that is uncertain, murmuring and warm, contrasting with the chill air washing over his forehead. Penelope is gone, gone to her desk job, gone to make some phone calls to help Peter get his first job without a collar, without an order, without an oughta. He does not know the rules of secular engagement, a battle he has not fought since childhood, when bigger boys with names like Bob and Doug and Al held his head in the water and baptized him in fear. Peter left them behind then and now he must interview with them, for jobs like selling lawnmowers, or managing a small print shop, or teaching English, or painting apartments. He fingers Penelope’s dagger, safe inside its small velvet box, and considers his options.

We sat at brunch, Molly, Sanja, Amy and I, and ate strawberries.  Amy pretended her strawberries were floating in champagne, but this time it was 7-Up, with some mint thrown in for the smell.  It was spring, but not the weekend of Easter.  I’m trying to remember, because things changed so suddenly after that.  Sometimes when I think about it, I seem to see ribbons and Easter grass, hidden eggs and baby girls in shiny pastel shoes like Jordan almonds, toddling along, baskets in hand. Here’s one, here’s one, says Aunt Jocelyn or Aunt Kathy or even young Eric, who has not yet noticed that it’s not manly to help the babies find their eggs on Easter.

But then, realistically (because realistic is what we are trying to achieve, right?), there was no park, no bunny, no pastels, no champagne. There was the sound of prayers hovering with the smoke at sunrise. There was the incense. There was that confused dream/nightmare feeling that mixes fireworks, celebration and death – even now I catch my breath when I see them go off and think about the ancient Chinese, who were artists of the exploding rose-winged dragon, and of the actual impact that blows off arms, noses, and acres of land that moments ago held what?  Sand, scarred roads, barbed wire, desert crops: almonds, sapote, dates, maybe a couple of straggling patches of naive cotton, cotton for ragdolls and memories?

Ragdolls and memories are wrapped bandages, wrapped bandages. There is a smell like saints. Why are saints all about suffering and death, I wonder as I eat strawberries with Molly, Sanja and Amy. They have forgotten – have they forgotten? – I don’t know and it is not Easter and I’ve been thinking about my old uncle Sam, who I haven’t seen since I was 7, when he was still alive and keeping peppermints in the pockets of his overalls. Funny to think of me and some old stoic Maine uncle – whose uncle was he, anyway? – sitting together on a wooden bench in front of a store where he knows everyone and I know only him and how did I get there?

Sometimes I have conspiracy theories, and sometimes I am calm and whistle songs I can’t name. Sometimes I wake up and know where I am. My uncle Sam, the one who must have been someone else’s uncle, my grandmother’s lover, my funny uncle, I just don’t know, only the feel of his comfortable belly and the smell of peppermint and sawdust. I remember he whistled old songs with that younger me.

In the back room, there was sawdust and the light was thick, heavy, coming through a window that hadn’t been cleaned since sometime before some war I’d heard about but was not yet born for, and the old guys played poker back there while I looked for bugs out on the front porch. But this is this war now and I’m a girl in overalls, I’m a girl who smells like peppermint and I try to raise goats with these brown kids in this dusty compound, and I give them candy like my old uncle Sam, whoever the hell he was.

Then again back before that, before the old uncle, there was the confession of old lady saints in my grandmother’s Nova Scotia. Whatever-all did the old martyrs of Nova Scotia come up against? Nessie? Old filthy crazy-assed fishermen with one leg and scurvy? Sounds like a movie now and that makes me want to shoot something.  A can or a dove or that star over there, the one that rises first and can easily be overlooked. The incidental light of a small star that probably died gazillions of years ago and someone is crying at the sight of it, crying into it like that moment really matters and the blood that was in the sawdust or the sand could be fresh and could be hundreds of years old, really, because sacrifice in the name of whatever has always been a part of us - like hardwired really - like lust, like wandering in the desert hasn’t always been there, and justice.

Amy and Sanja and Molly and I decided back then that we would stop every morning at sunrise and sunset and press our heads against the dry earth or into the cool mud of wherever our memories might take us and let the images rise. Who can live without memory, I would like to know? Who can live without memory to build and destroy those walls?  Who can live without water and blood?

Sanja and Molly and Amy and I have brunch together at least once every three months, usually at the changing of the season. I got a tattoo after I got home. Molly says her head is tattoo enough; Sanja strokes the fading marks trailing down her neck. Amy laughs more than all of us and brings strawberries every time, in case the brunch menu has somehow left them off. Strawberries bursting with juice, falling through the effervescence, held momentarily in space with fresh mint leaves. We make our toast – to memory – and talk for an hour, 90 minutes, about our here and now. Kisses, girls, to love, to loss, to forgetfulness, to the great deadly desert between us.

Light travels in red grey sunset angles through the deep trees in the ancient jungle. Tiny Australopithecus rummages underneath his leafy bed and slides into his flip-flops. Strapping on the pith helmet left him by his grandfather, the great great great grand father of the hominid just before us, he walks quietly into the night.

He walks quietly into the night; stealth is a gift we are given by the DNA of our common ancestry with things that need both to be afraid and to be feared. I carry a stick. You carry a stick. Miraculously, the enormous lonely rhythm of the heart running through the carotid artery and out again keeps fear at bay and carries messages through the jungle that we are ant we are anteater we are poodle we are dictator. Blood messages, like time travelers, salinating and desalinating the bitter taste of worry. Quickly, quickly, quickly tricking the heart into believing in the ticking of the bomb that carries away sweetness and the mating of apes and aphids.

The mating of apes and aphids is contained in a module on biological sciences, stored in the library next to a laminated poster of dinosaurs eating swamp grass, heads swiveling, looking for predators. In the courtyard nearby there is a substitute teacher; he is sweating and his eyebrows feel worried. He strokes his face and wishes he had not dropped out of graduate school again. He strokes his face and looks down the hall. He is tall, the hall is long, the bell has rung and he is surrounded by a sea of pygmies, washing around him and he is afraid. He sees a boy and thinks of himself and thinks about sitting out in the parking lot listening to Abba on his Ipod, but today is a strange day and someone would probably call the police to report a strange man with worried eyebrows sitting alone in his car, and at least inside the school he has a known identity. Sub. Subject. Subjected. There is such as thing as too closely shaved; his skin feels raw and shiny like a baby something, a baby something not human, more newt-like or reptilian, and the air feels cold rushing against his naked face as the children open and close the doors on their way to the playground.

On their way to the playground they find a fossil. They find many fossils, and some sticks. Here: I carry a stick and you carry a stick. Put the stick down. Put the stick down. Then later all of them pouring out of the playground like Ovaltine and slightly burned milk, too hot to settle down now. The man is an Australopithecus wandering lonely in the jungle, the desert, the changing expectations, the creased perma-press dockers, the perma-frost largely unmentioned in classroom or cafeteria but ubiquitous nonetheless. Ubiquitous, the melting down of hard to soft, of cold to hot, the disenfranchisement of order. The blacktop is melted, the tar pits are hardened, the hominid hums a little tune and carries a little stick to dig in the earth. He digs in the earth, humming a little tune and then he goes home and sings the song to his son.

He goes home and sings the song to his son and they make a new bed together, out of rushes woven together and this year there are no stinging insects, because the cold that surprised them killed the mites that bit them and the woman who bore the children. They carry their little sticks and pots of water and grow things, and then centuries – thousands upon thousands of them – happen. The waters melt and freeze and someone invents Miracle Whip and pajamas and then they are here, with the frightened substitute teacher and the freakish death of the drummer for Abba, who fell through a window and slit his own throat. He carried a stick, and he hummed little songs for himself and his daughter, his little dancing queen now all grown up but fatherless and the substitute teacher is sad today.

The substitute teacher is sad today, but like the tides will get over it and reach in and out of the bag in which he carries his secrets, the sorrows and those epiphanies that surprise us whenever we find them, no matter how many times we’ve found them before. It’s the scrabble bag, all the letters are the same every time but the recombination of elements makes every moment new. All the letters are the same every time. Origin of species giving us the same dreams dreamed by a tiny man in a timeless world in a spinning orb in the gasses that surround us. Light travels from unimaginable distances to unimaginable distances, light travels like time, light travels like no time, light travels, light travels.

I put an ice cube on the hot skin of my ping-pong hunter. We were sweating – it is true, we were sweating and I, so thirsty, kept carrying the green glass pitcher into the grass hut, where there was a young pachuca kahuna belicana - he said yes ma’am can I help you? And I said yes, it’s this fever and he brought me chilled coconut milk in a small blue glass, and filled the green glass pitcher with ice. I carried it back on a thin wooden tray. I wondered why is this tray not warped or weakened with heat and sweat and long nights with tidal pulls shredding the wood fibers apart? But it was not. It was light and gentle, a tray for the sick bed, a tray for malaria, a tray for a cool glass of coconut milk, lime and a little bowl of ice with a thin cotton towel cooled just right for delirium.

Here are the words I did not say, the specials on today’s menu: Lost salad, sorrow soup, and a pot of bitter teas. They are not written on the chalkboard and not offered up by the tidy wait man with the impeccable manners. I believe and say that his name must be Barnabas, not the Barnabas of circuses but the Barnabas of gothic nightmares. Barnabas was cousin to Beethoven: Germanic, deaf, hairless and rude. He told his manservant to walk the dog, to toast the bread, to spread it with marmalade, to avoid the tirade and tyrranies of dark old countries where bread is sour and to cover the altars of our mothers with burlap. Rough, old, functional, perfect for gardening or for famine. Burlap rough like penance, rough like Buddha before the release, Buddha before his awkward beginnings, Buddha experimenting with the language of non-attachment.

When the Buddha travelled by boat, by dirigible, by astral means, he met on his travels an old woman of pachucan descent and she shook him by his detached shoulders and his head fell off. The rolling head of the Buddha fell down the mountainside, picked up first by Persephone but then rejected and then by Sisyphus who pushed it back up to the top of the mountain again and again until it fell down and wounded the heel of the baby Achilles and then crashed against the broken rib of the Fisher King and then into the kingdom that will not heal and then to the county fair and the state fair and then to the quilting bee and the spelling bee and the public school and the private room and the tray for malaria, and the turkey farm where drowning is a common occurrence, what with foolishness and the frequently changing weather that leaves us standing out in the open fields in the pouring rain with our heads tilted back and our mouths open, drowning in the absence of detachment, in spite of the counsel of Sor Buddha, Sor Maria, Sor Juana, la Señora del Lago and her assorted sisters, all of them dry and wet and wound with wisdom like wool, wrapped around shoulders that shake, lost salad, sorrow soup.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part I

Wherein we have a problem, a need for absolution, a problem that drops oh soft and miserable onto the sand. The sand where the pilgrims wandered, the sand where the hoi polloi met in tents and barbecue stands, where the ribs were sucked clean and the fingers were washed in the blood of the lamb and in little bowls of clear water. Absolution shooting out of deep skies in lost cities in continents local and far away, as far away as Obiwan as far away as Moses as far away as Jesus as far away as Osama as close as Jerry as close as Mike as close as election day as close as daybreak, as close as faith.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part II

We planted snapdragons, we did, one spring and they bloomed. We sang to them in the yard, all of us, with the karaoke machine hooked up to the orange extension cord that we jerryrigged with an adapter that made it foolish dangerous but we’d read in a catalog, a farmer’s almanac, a hippie guide to life on other planets that life on this planet is better when you sing to your flowers. So we did, karaoke Joan Jett and Hannah Montana and Alice Cooper and Louis Armstrong, I see skies of blue red roses too I watch them bloom for me and you and I think to myself what a wonderful world. Those were the best snapdragons and daffodils and bluebells and little wild roses that ever grew in our sucking mud clay. Then one day the plug overheated and the cord melted and there was a little spark in the early morning dew and that was the end of our snadragon concert.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part III

Wherein we have a problem, the problem of virtue and right living, wherein we have a problem of definition and decay, wherein the blessed is the man that walketh not in the council of the ungodly, but rather becomes the reconstitution of mashed potatoes and purified water and loaves and fishes, wherein amendments play American gladiator with commandments and we all sit down and direct our prayers to several kinds of mecca, where our knees are the worn knees of supplicants and carpet layers, where the marshmallow visions come thick, fast, and suffocating.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part IV

Cyclic, of course, like gardens and bleeding, like saviours and sinners, the devil is a dog with his tail between his legs. We set aside our discontents, said be grateful for where we live, said thank you sweet Jesus for not making me live in Lubbock or Manchester, thank you for soccer, thank you for my libido and yours, thank you for gratitude, thank you for honest mistakes,  thank you for chicken-fried steak, and once again thank you that I can have chicken-fried steak without having to live in Lubbock, A-men.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part D

Wherein we change all the regulations and re-write the rules and then hold a few meetings and air some dirty laundry and discover that we’ve all been angry and discontented all this time and that secretly we all knew it would never ever work anyway and then we reconvene to discuss the whole mess later, after the funding’s been approved and then we all go home to watch Indian movies, Bollywood taking us far away from all this. We all go home and dream of frog princes in Bombay, their handsome black-lined eyes, their promises, and when Pavlov calls us, we wake willingly.

The Menstrual Chronicles, Part VI

I sit in the radio silence, there is static but in that moment I am meditative, calm, ecstatic, supraservient and then there is a moment, a moment unlike the others in which we watch the sea change from blue to green to black to gold. Fecundity, fidelity, fear, faith, the heirophant and the rod. It’s looking like a game of Texas hold ‘em from here. Play it close to the vest, watch their eyes and their hands and those little twitching places we’ve all got somewhere that gives away our secrets, for those who are looking.

**Take note: This is a completely improvisational, altogether unedited, 30 minutes timed writing in group. I offer no guarantees of quality or sense, it is just pen to paper, write it and let it go.

Under the hill we performed reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead, ascension into descent, descent past sun through clouds to trees then grass and under the hill, six feet under, planted only a mile from where we married, two miles from where our children were born.

We performed reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead, fire into ash, water into dust. Like movie stars, I guess, traveling fast, dying young, more like a teenage tragedy song I might have listened to once. This reverse most likely to last, 2cool 2be 4gotten. Here lies Ned Hall, you and me babe, so I buried the Harley with you and think that some day you’ll come get me whether I want you to or not.

What’s it like to be a widow at 22, you are wondering? Some kind of break-up, like you pissed me off messing with some other girl so I dumped you, only then you were just gone, not with that girl, she’s just a phantom hanging with you at the graveyard while time holds tight onto me, arms around my waist, keeping me on top of this hill with you, feeling like a complete fool.

So eventually I got tired of being the widow and left – of course I did – you know I always do – and one day woke up single, not a trace of you left. It’s not in any letter, I had the headstone removed, I bought a Volvo wagon, and I never thought about you ever ever again.