Honey and Shade

These are the final drafts of all those stories I've been working on. If you don't like them, don't tell me about it! I already asked for constructive feedback, and now it's too late. I just submitted my short story chapbook, "Honey and Shade," to the 2008 Burnside Review fiction chapbook contest. I'm not expecting to win or anything, but I would be very excited if I was shortlisted.

The Lion

Nan’s eyes focused on a tattered bouquet of hyacinths stewing in a vase filled with green water. The hot sun glinted off the glass and cut into her. Clothes and shoes rubbled the ground, and on her nightstand perched a wine glass soiled with the sediment of red wine. It was Sunday morning. Her husband Lars lay sleeping with his mouth open, old air whistling through him. She pondered the indignity of sleep for a moment—the gaseous eruptions, scraping snorts, seeping drool, and rank mouth. Practicing for decay. Her own nakedness irked her, and she wrapped a robe around herself.
The grinder cut drily into the coffee beans, growling, and Nan swept them into the coffee maker. Water glinted; the pot heated up and groaned. The sun glared at some old grime on the counter. She heard Lars creak into the room. He was rubbing his overgrown hair; a boyish potbelly poked shyly over his boxers. He wandered over to the computer on the desk in their living room, drawn by the morning news. As Nan poured her coffee into a chipped old mug that read “DUCKS,” the steam curled up, drifting like a veil, imitating the drift and curl of the mane on the wall.
“What the hell?” Nan yelled. A lion with baroquely detailed fur that curled like wet pubic hair stared at her with disproportionately large eyeballs. Its face was unfinished, lacking jaws.
“Lars, you need to come over here.”
Lars kept staring at the computer screen for a moment.
“Lars.”
Lars disengaged heavily and turned the chair around to see what she was looking at.
“Lars, what is this?” Nan demanded.
Lars stared at her. “How would I know? Do you think I put that there? You know I can’t draw worth a damn.”
Nan let out an irritated gust of air, and then crushed her face into a glare. The lion was cold and sharp, and somehow it projected a rococo jauntiness at the same time, like an opaque and salacious jester.
They stared at the lion for a while, touching its hard gloss gingerly.
“Could this be some version of mass hysteria?” Lars suggested. “Couples hysteria? Could this be a hallucination?”
Nan looked again at Lars, her face a fist. She didn’t know how he could have engineered this defacement of their kitchen, but she still felt suspicious. She had often suspected him of a secret playfulness when in reality he possessed very little of the stuff. An altogether earnest remark from Lars would sometimes earn him a jagged and unjust glance from wary Nan. Nan grew up with a single mother whose frequent fatigue would unsheathe a snarling sarcasm. The rest of the time, she spoke a language of facetious stings.
The truth was that to Lars, language was a flat, shallow medium, and people who wielded a language swarming with ambiguities and double meanings rather frightened him. Indeed, he had initially been drawn to Nan because of her utter lack of a sense of humor, and her penchant for communicating with either a nod of affirmation or a swipe of displeasure from her big-knuckled paw. Lars also admired the fact that she seemed to have no awareness whatsoever of the treasures she bore on her body; she had beautiful breasts, as big and soft and round as peonies.
They decided to take a walk to see if it was still there when they came back. Autumn was stirring the stagnant summer. It was arachnid season; spiders placed their nets carefully at the teeming, invisible openings between summer and fall. Nan and Lars hardly noticed the tender wind that cleaned out the tough summer air and made the neighborhood cats drunk with a scent like lukewarm mead. When they returned to their tiny apartment, the lion was still there; only this time, its face was complete, and it gulped down a gnarled, dripping sun in its jaws.
“Let’s just wait,” said Lars. He looked at the dishwasher and thought about loading it.
The obscurity of nighttime was not comforting. They were visited by Soledad, an old coworker of Nan’s who had died of lung cancer a year earlier. She had been very large and pockmarked, with an air of limp martyrdom about her, but always gave off a delicious odor of ripe apricots, despite her cigarette smoking. The two had cleaned their apartment, and Nan had done laundry, draping some of Lars’ work shirts over a chair in lieu of hanging them in the closet. They retired and slept a gauzy sleep riddled with holes. Around 3:00 a.m., Nan awakened Lars by mumbling into his ear: “The dogs in the smoke.”
“What dogs? What smoke?” Lars asked.
“Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I think you’re talking in your sleep, Nan.”
Her eyes, the color of pea soup, were half open, and she stared at the chair she had clothed with Lars’ shirts. The shirts were a black mass in the dark, and as she stared, it seemed to revolve and shift, until Nan became aware of Soledad’s presence in the chair. The odor of camel lights and apricots wafted over. The large, honey-skinned woman gazed at her, then took a drag from her cigarette and a sip from her cola beverage.
“Holy hell… Nan,” said Lars. The shape lazily rolled back into a pile of clothes. The dusty odor of cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of apricots. Nan closed her eyes again, and when Lars tried to talk to her, she needled him with a swollen-eyed glare. More and more, Nan seemed irritated with Lars’ presence in her bed, seeming to regard him as an interloper in their marriage. She maintained a swift and carnivorous sexual appetite, but disliked cuddling afterwards, preferring to get up and roam into the kitchen for a snack of pickles or pepperoncinis. She particularly loathed oral sex, and had responded to Lars’ early attempts at husbandly ministrations with a swipe.
The next morning spoke to Nan with a voice that sounded simultaneously like a creaking door, a frog being stepped on, and a pleasant, smoky roar. The strewn clothes made their bedroom look haggard and torn. The busy, guttural sound was coming from the living room. Lars sat up in bed, rubbing his face, and Nan, always the intrepid one, got up, opened the door, and closed it behind her.
All the surfaces of their apartment appeared to be covered in a black, oil-slicked skin that shifted and stirred. Nan recognized the birds as starlings; they coated everything, preening and busily throating a hearty and varied song. The door was cheerfully open, as if the apartment had invited the pests in for a pit stop.
A sense of helpless rage engulfed Nan; an image of herself as a child, hiding in a tree whose leaves clothed her in a shadowy loneliness while starlings offered up an unhelpful mash of hybrid sounds, leftovers gleaned from some shared dump of human and animal communication.
After the thump of rage, a wave of overstimulation; the rainbow slick iridescence of the birds lubricated her senses, making them uncomfortably keen.
“I have to go to work,” she told the throng, angrily, and parted the sea of birds to reach the coffeemaker.
Lars remained in the bedroom, although he, too, had to go to work. The bright and pebbled sounds outside the door became an insurmountable barrier. He lay in bed until a wave of drowsiness overtook him, and he slipped into a skin of dream. He had heard that a man who wanted to bring all the birds of Shakespeare’s plays into the New World had introduced starlings into the United States. He was that man. He was opening cage after cage, letting the black mass boil up and disperse.
He was the birds; a massive collective consciousness fucking and releasing streams of sound and more starlings into the world; thriving and laying down a layer of filth in areas most heavily saturated by humans; a peppery plague, congealing and wheeling in sloppy formations across the United States.
Lars awoke to the sound of the phone ringing in his living room—the croak of the starlings had ceased. He let it ring until it stopped, and the ensuing silence roared in his ears.
He was overtaken by a deep sense of punishment and remorse; he looked out the window, and the singing sky fell upon him, tearing his heart open with jaws of blue fire.


Honey and Shade

“As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances. Or was it a secret plot by Russia or Osama Bin Laden to bring down American agriculture? Or, as some blogs have asserted, the rapture of the bees, in which God recalled them to heaven? Researchers have heard it all.”
--Barrionuevo, Alexei. “Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons.” The New York Times 23 April, 2007 http://www.nytimes.com

There were times when Mom would not let me read, as a punishment. Our bathroom had a light switch and a lock outside the door. She would lock me in the bathroom with the light off for at least an hour. At first, I rocked back and forth and yelled, feeling like I was suffocating. I banged my head against the door until I spent myself. Then, the waves and ripples on my surface ceased, and I listened, and sometimes I stopped thinking. Once, I had the sensation of not knowing where I was in space—whether I was upside down, sideways, or right side up. I felt like an enormous palm was cradling my body in a senseless vacuum.
What if God confiscated shadows and shade, as a punishment? The unrelenting light would gush in. An even, lukewarm light that scrubbed out distinction. A dry, aching, irritating death would ensue.
I felt dry when the bees went away. Heavy sheets of honey draped and were silent. I had not heard a bee since the third of April, when I was out in the garden, lying in the grass, greasing potato bugs with my palms and seeking out Daddy Long Legs. At that moment, a buzz rolled against my head, giving me a strangely pleasurable feeling of intimacy. I lay still until it slid away.
July Holberger’s lavender plants gushed forth, as they always did that time of year. She didn’t have time to garden, she said. She worked the night shift and slept all day, but she liked lavender plants, and chocolate mint. These plants ran rampant around the borders in her back yard, creating a walled fortress of purple and dusky green, and the purple always bristled with honeybees fat with the pleasure of their work. This year, though, all the coaxing of the glorious lavender came to naught. Beeless, they stood forlorn, covered with a fine film of sexual rejection.
The Bee’s Cottage, which housed a vast bee citadel, was mum; its radiating din had died. It pouted in the corner of the field in front of the stream, like a child wearing a dunce cap. I was salivating to discover its riches; after so many years of human neglect and fine bee cultivation, I knew it would be laden with sweets and mysteries. I thrilled at the familiar fear the Cottage evoked, that the bee swarm would swallow us up and murder us with its venomous fangs of fierce loyalty and love. I had been warned and forbidden.
For a moment, I glanced at the glass doors leading to the living room, pinched by guilt. Inside, Mommy was folding laundry, occasionally glancing at a TV program that showed piles of wobbly chicks dropping onto conveyer belts, hundreds of them plopping and rolling, yellow wisps of nothing trickling into funnels.
I turned away. Looking at July’s lavender, I felt startled for an instant that it was empty of bees. The Cottage itself just looked like a windswept, grey shack without the bees moving in and out, building their empire. I moved towards it. So did a short, thick lady with a large straw hat. She was an old woman I saw around town sometimes. I thought she might be a sorceress, because she was always picking up strange things—a dusty feather, a porcupine quill, a delicate blue eggshell—and examining them as if gauging the power they held. She looked over at me and jerked. “You startled me!”
“Oh, sorry,” I said.
“That’s ok,” she said. The old woman continued walking towards the Bee’s Cottage; I no longer interested her.
“Wait a second!” I said. “Are you going over to that Bee’s Cottage?”
She stopped and looked back at me. Her eyes were glacial. Then she looked at the Cottage. “Oh! You call it that? It has an enormous hive inside, right? I get it.” She laughed a little. She seemed very normal in that moment, like she was someone else’s mom chatting with mine at a school function. Except she was dirty and pungent. I knew what livestock smelled like, because we lived on the verge of the country, and I walked by quite a few cows in my wandering. She had that sharp, fetid odor to her.
“Can I walk over there with you?” I asked her.
“Sure, go ahead,” she said, as if she didn’t mean it. “Well, just be quiet, ok? I mean, I like kids alright, but I don’t really want to hear a lot of chattering about this and that.”
I remained silent and nodded.
“Besides, a rapture took place here recently. We should be respectful.”
We padded over the rest of the grass to reach the Cottage. Mommy always mowed a certain length of yard and let the rest do “whatever the hell it wanted to do,” because we didn’t own that part. I don’t know who did. It was just a big, wild field. It was a little dangerous, letting things get so unruly, and I kept expecting the vast wildness to breed some kind of huge beast; but I liked it that way, and so did the coyotes and rodents and snakes. There were strange things to be found out there, like the door of a truck devoured by rust, a bicycle wheel, a cracked mug with a teddy bear on it. All this debris waited under the changing sky like the fragments of a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean.
So we made our way through the fecund tangles until we reached the Cottage. The wooden door felt heavy and reluctant because it was swollen with moisture and stuck in the soil. We cracked it open.
The walls were packed tightly with honeycomb, an exhilarating bounty of it, shining dully like ancient gold doubloons. The honeycomb sang out to us in a tightly wound harmony. I looked over at the older woman, who was quietly resonating.
I moved over to the honeycomb. It was thick and generous, and bulged in places. One could slice or core it like a tree and read an ancient history into it. It seemed like it would sate any hunger, but I was afraid to violate its integrity. I leaned into the clean amber, mesmerized. The empty tidiness of it filled me with an aching sense of loss.
Peripherally, I saw the old woman reach out and grab a pitcher and a cup from a shelf. She looked inside and grinned. “How about something refreshing?” she suggested. She tipped the pitcher over the cup, and shining ants gushed forth. They began to clump up, and she had to shake the pitcher a little to fill the cup.
“Ah, yes,” she said, offering the cup to me. I declined. She laughed, lifted it to her lips, and allowed the ants to trickle out. Except they wouldn’t quite stay in her mouth, for the most part; they leaked out the side of her lips, a black trail, like an exposed, hair-thin root. I gazed at her, wondering what sorcery she was conducting.
The place looked like it had recently been swept, and was empty save the single shelf nailed to the wall with its offering of ant refreshment. My eyes were drawn once again to the walls; the combs gleamed. They were perfect, except… there was a dark clot in one wall that warped the symmetry of the surrounding cells. The old woman saw my gaze pointing at it. She grunted.
“That is exactly what I was looking for.”
She pried it out with her neat fingernails. It looked like a dehydrated fetus, blackened, curling.
She sniffed it, and showed it to me. It was some kind of small animal, a rat maybe. All sealed up in honey, its eyelids bleak and unyielding.
“An intruder who couldn’t keep his nose to himself,” she explained. She touched the tip of her tongue to its sweet exoskeleton. “They killed him and mummified him with honey. Yes, this is a treasure,” and she no longer seemed interested in the place, which shone like a cave of ice.
“Be careful now, dear,” she told me. She left. And I lay down in the clean honey cave. My thoughts went their merry way. I thought about how I would get married one day, and have children, and live in a neighborhood that was trimmed. That scared me a little. Would all the bees go out of me then? With the place all trimmed and cut back, would there be no bees to keep me clean and sweet, and to kill intruders? No singing fortress of order and purpose and poised weaponry? But then I knew that was silly, because we had never trimmed this place, and the bees had still been raptured, so it didn’t seem to make a difference anyway. The cave was a tomb that would crumble and go to ruin, and the bees’ language of comb and rich, slow liquid would remain untranslated.
I lay on my back in the tomb a while longer, pretending to be dead. Then I rose and pushed on the heavy door until it rolled open.



Strangler Fig

The baby’s posy lips were a signal. Her eyes, black and shining as beetles; her rich brown skin; the generous chub of her cheeks; and her solemn, dignified expression were a treatise on beauty. And like a Platonic ideal suddenly slipping into the cave and illuminating it, her presence filled everyone with a sudden, bright yearning.
At age 19, Mona had never really noticed babies before; but this one made her feel a tender pain, like something had gently probed the inside of her chest.
“What is her name?” she asked the mother, a young, blond housewife who had jogged there with a slick-looking sports stroller.
“Elfa,” said the mother, then told the baby to “say hi!” Elfa continued gazing at Mona, her frown deepening. Her face was as intricate, supple and fragile as exquisite embroidery.
“Hi, Elfa,” Mona whispered, and the long line behind the baby’s face suddenly came into focus, making her heart pound a little. She took the woman’s money and disappeared into a fog of cashiering, mixing and serving for a time.
When the nauseating, rocking tide of strangers had gone, leaving a smattering of people reading the paper or texting on their cell phones, the baby and the mother were still there. The baby was sucking on a hard cookie, patiently softening it. It was afternoon, and the rain fell heavily, like a curtain, darkening and obscuring everything. The mother and baby waited, both gazing outside.
Mona looked at the baby. Her soul was like a blank stage lit by a harsh spotlight. She was waiting for something to walk on and change her, or at least create some contrasting shadows. She was taking college classes part time, but nothing absorbed her. Her favorite thing to do was sleep; she devoured sleep with an insatiable hunger. When she wasn’t sleeping, she was usually in the bathtub. Lately, her skin had shrunk from the feel of anything too dry; a piece of paper, a tablecloth, her elbow. She preferred the smooth and the moist. She liked the feel of the shiny carafe she used to steam milk. She liked its building warmth. Also, she liked to be alone. People confused her, and they always had; she was a little afraid of them. She preferred to be with her mother, who never required that she talk or perform. In the past, Mona had also liked needlework and building bicycles. Her aversion to dryness had caused her to abandon the needlework, however, and she had forgotten about bicycles. But there were rusted-out bicycles and the shaded outlines of other things crowding her deep down like remnants at the bottom of a lake. Who knew what could be dredged up?
A great grey blur at the glass door, and then a strange beast came skulking in—a mass of multiple limbs, double heads, unnatural lumps and angles draped in a soaked, soiled overcoat. It moved awkwardly, like two people in a horse costume, and it moved with the slowness of something infinitely heavy, like a mountain during an earthquake. After Mona’s shock subsided, the beast resolved in her vision into two women huddled beneath an enormous, elephant-colored overcoat. One of them was shorter than the other, and her face was partially obscured beneath the overcoat, the sleeve hanging emptily by her neck.
Mona realized that she was seeing a Joined pair. It was clear that the Joining hadn’t occurred in the womb because of the striking differences in their appearance. One was pale, with dark hair forming sideburns on her cheeks. She was bulky and unevenly colored, pink with grey splotches on her face. The other was taller, with black-fringed eyes of an almond shape, her skin a dusty color, her lips full and sneering. They had submitted themselves to the Joining operation, that much was clear—but the overcoat hid exactly where they were linked. It was the first such person Mona had ever seen, though she had read about the Spiritual Order of the Joined in an article in O Magazine entitled, “The Joining: Triumph and Heartache.”
Their presence in the room was heavy, like the rain that blanketed the shop. It slowly grew until Mona began to feel suffocated. Nobody moved. Finally, she asked, “What can I get for you?”
“A huge hot chocolate,” said the blotchy one. They moved forward, slowly, painfully. It occurred to Mona that they must have received this weight only recently—they were not fluid in their movements yet, but clattered together like sundry objects loosely piled up in a moving vehicle, without order or nuance, oafish. They carefully placed two chairs side by side, then sat, looking discomfited. Mona heated their milk, mixed the hot chocolate, built a bit of foam to dollop the top. The rain lifted suddenly. The trees and cars outside dripped heavily, and long strands of water slid languidly from the stunted tree that grew outside one of the coffee shop windows. The sun shone vigorously, refracting sharp knives of light off the dripping water. Mona realized that the mother and baby had gone without her noticing.
The artificial twins were staring at her in unison. She noticed that the pale one had deep gouges in her cheeks, and the darker one had shallow eyes with fat lids. Mona thought maybe she had gone to high school with that one. Timidly, she asked, “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
The woman looked disgusted and turned her head to stare out the window. They had taken off the overcoat, but it was still not clear where they were connected. They had solved the attire issue by wearing an enormous muumuu that enveloped their sandwiched arms. For a moment, Mona’s mind darted to the dampness that must seep from all that flesh compressed together, and the red wound of the seam that joined them, and then she crushed the thought.
“We are Matapalo,” said the gouge-faced one, taking a sip of the hot chocolate.
“It means Strangler Fig,” said the other one, leering, and the shower began to let up; the softly lit rain made the café glow softly, like quartz.
Time stretched taut while Mona puttered around the shop. She tried to ignore Strangler Fig’s silent presence while the café visitors left, one by one. She could not. They continued to be there, a thick mote in the corner of her eye. Turning up the music and scrubbing vigorously at the floor behind the bar, her eyes firmly locked on a stain, did not help. Nor did going in the back to do the dishes. Suddenly, she forgot, and time slackened; it was then that they left. She finished her cleaning and worked on her homework in the empty café for an hour.
When it was time for her to go home, the moisture in the sky hung low, a fur coat of cloud that closed in the warmth and reflected the light of the city with an old-looking, rusty glow. After packing up her almost-finished homework, piling large, impersonal college texts into her backpack and then shouldering it, Mona grabbed her navy blue wool pea coat and threw it over her arm. She turned to lock the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a dark bulk shifting towards her. She turned—the crooked row of Strangler Fig’s four eyes stared at her. “I thought I would walk you home,” said the thick lips of the thick-lidded one.
“No, thank you,” Mona mumbled. She awkwardly shifted the bag around as she put the keys away. They stared at her, not moving as she turned her back to them and walked away. As she walked home, she thought furtively about why they would have taken an interest in her. She must know them from somewhere, separately, or at least one of them. They were a half-formed memory that itched the back of her mind. She couldn’t stop herself from throwing nervous glances behind her as she walked, though she tried to distract herself by picturing the clear-faced, exquisite baby she had been admiring earlier.
When she arrived home and moved towards the aroma of lentil soup in the kitchen, splinters of shock went through her body at the sight of a hulking mass double-seated at the table with her mother. Strangler Fig looked preposterous in the gargantuan muumuu.
“Have a seat, sweetie. Have some soup,” said her mother, smiling. The years had softened her face to the dusty texture of a lamb’s ear—it was a texture that Mona loved. Her skin had loosened, allowing her smile to embrace her face with greater fullness and acceptance. The old event of Mona’s father’s abandonment had beaten a velveteen softness into that face.
Although she was very hungry, Mona said, “No, thank you, Mom. I think I’m going out.”
The blotchy one stared at her greenly. The other head was turned towards her mother; she could not see its expression. Mona left the room and strode up the stairs. They could hear the floor creak as she entered her room. The dark one took her mother’s hand and squeezed it, smiling at her. The blotchy one ripped a chunk from the baguette and said, “This soup is very nourishing.”
Mona’s room was tidy, with faded Matisse prints on the wall that she had collected during a vivid moment in high school, and it had a windswept smell because she had left the window open a bit. She was sitting with her hands over her face. Her shirt was unbuttoned, her pants unzipped. After a moment, she finished removing her coffee-stenched clothes and put her thin shoes back on. Her cell phone began to ring; she saw that it was a boy she had gone on a few dates with, but she silenced it. She unleashed a gust of stale coffee odor as she let down her heavy, dusky hair. Then she grabbed her purse and clattered down the stairs, ignoring the threesome whose presence in the kitchen at the back of the house was like a thick black slab of shadow in the back of her mind.
She hesitated a moment in the front yard. There wasn’t really anywhere to go. The neighborhood was firmly middle class but not smooth. It was more snaggle-toothed than the newer neighborhoods nearby that gorged on what once was an expanse of farmland and, before that, a wood populated by massive trees (she presumed)—ancient beings that had finally been wrestled to the ground. On a distant hill, she could see where the houses in the new development stood, some facing this direction, some that, crowding each other silently like a demented audience.
No, in her neighborhood, there was space to inhale. She liked the different angles of the driveways and streets, the hills, the drab primness of some yards and the shaggy disheveled look of others. There were a few fearsome dogs, but most had an eager benevolence coursing from their tails to their smiling faces.
Still, there was nowhere to go. The coffeeshop where she worked was the only business within reasonable walking distance. So she moved aimlessly, barely aware of where she was. The color drained out of the sky as clouds tangled together and darkened. She found herself walking around the elementary school track, the cold air flowing over and through her. In a while—she didn’t know how long—the light had almost completely slithered down the horizon. A stream of rain began to slip over her body, chilling her. She stood there a moment in the middle of the track, then began to walk home, her face grimacing as her clothes grew heavy with rain. She walked quickly and with great tension.
When she arrived home, the kitchen was clean. Damp surfaces shone. She slipped off her muddy shoes and called, “Mom?” her voice thin, like a little girl. There was no answer.
She checked her mother’s room, then the basement. Then she climbed the stairs. The bathroom door gaped, breathing a faint odor of mildew. She climbed the stairs again, moving up to the attic, a tiny room occupied by little more than a rocking chair. But she could smell incense wafting down. Dread drifted through her body; she knew they were up there, but it was completely silent.
She entered the small room. Three heads bent together. The gaping red flowers on the muumuu flashed in Mona’s eyes as the Strangler Fig’s arms surrounded her mother ever so gently. Her mother’s eyes were closed, her soft face calm and still. The Strangler Fig’s heads were whispering something inaudible. Mona’s mother looked up and, once again, smiled at her. “Hi,” she said. “They’re teaching me their form of meditation. Do you want to join us?”
Later, her mother would reassure her that she truly knew Strangler Fig, that they had attended her book club for months. But Mona, her eyes wounded by the fierce red flowers, and terrified by Strangler Fig’s inexorable embrace of her mother, said, “No—don’t touch me—” and streamed down the stairs, undone.



His Last Day

He looked at the foot that protruded from the end of the cover. The big toe nail was yellow, like a nicotine stain, thick, and in need of clipping. A large bunion adorned the place where the big toe joined the rest of the foot. Her foot was skinny, which made the lump look grotesque. Part of her little toe had been torn off and replaced by red crust. It seemed odd to him that a woman like her would neglect her feet so much. Her body was pleasing, but her eyes were dumb and a little alien, like a goat’s.
It was imperative that she exit his bed. He was grateful that the alcohol had thinned out his sleep, awakening him in time to avert the disaster.
“Wake up,” he said. He nudged her gingerly, with distaste.
She rolled over, her face pasty with disuse and folded with sleep. “Hm?”
“Get up, please. I have to get ready for work.”
“What? It’s three o’clock in the morning!”
“I have to be at work in an hour.” His excuse limped.
She stared at him for a moment, giving the anger time to awaken and stretch out. Then she pulled her cigarette-stenched clothes on: a black skirt and a metallic, backless piece of cloth that served the function of barely covering her chest. The fumbling rapidity of her movements, like a scene in a movie, was meant to convey the fact that she had taken offense.
“I’ll call you a cab,” he said.
“Fuck you, asshole,” she said as she opened the door, her purse swinging. The night winked at him viciously for a moment, just before she slammed the door.
He lay back. Fortunately, she hadn’t noticed the crunching rustle underneath the sheets. She was probably still a little drunk. He looked around the room. He was hungry, but the light was bothering him. It was a long, narrow room, with a torn couch, a slender bed, and a cheap-looking desk lined up in a row. The kitchen lay at the end of this line, and a small, windowless bathroom lurked at its front. A tiny, dusty television squatted on a cheap plywood shelf across from the couch. A thin corridor allowed a body to move between the couch, the bed, the desk, and the kitchen. He got up, went to the refrigerator, and took out two tortillas and a bag of grated cheese. He sprinkled the grated cheese between the tortillas and placed the whole thing in the microwave. He felt the way he always felt when he was sobering up, like millions of small bubbles had popped and left little pockets of air inside him. His stomach felt like it was floating unpleasantly.
He sat down on the bed and took a few bites from the quesadilla he had made, staring at nothing. An image of her foot swung into his mind, and he swatted it away. But then it returned. There had been something particularly odd about that foot. The edge of some weird birthmark curling up from its sole. For some reason it made him nervous to think about, so he stopped.
He woke up about four hours later, split through with a realization. The girl’s blue hair and yellow eyes, the fact that he had met her in the Brindle Dog Bar, and the birthmark that wagged up the arch of her foot—the “birthmark” that was actually the Mark of the Dog… all these signs made up a gruesome text that informed him that the woman was a Howler.
His sheets were soaked, as usual. Normally he placed them in the washing machine right away and headed for the shower, but today he lay steeping in the cold, wet stench a while longer.
He repeated the thought to himself, trying to sculpt it into understanding: he had insulted a Howler woman. He would be dead by nightfall.
Howlers: rent limbs, torn arteries; finely honed rage; a pack of furies. The stories never made it to the paper. The justice of the Howlers was too relentless for anyone to want to question too closely, but the Howlers allowed the stories of their darker doings to seep into the hushed lull that sometimes immerses a small flock of drunken men very late at night. The Howlers existed on a thin plane between the plates of the earth. As long as you walked a tight tread and kept your gaze two feet straight in front of you and didn’t excavate, you were safe. Why had he been so reckless? Why go to the Brindle Dog Bar? An image of the bar, its walls studded with sheep and goat heads, intruded into his cringing thoughts. Some alien being inside him must have wanted to lie down on a conveyer belt that would transport him to dismantlement and death.
His shower was brief. His life had suddenly been squeezed into a walnut shell. On each side, a smooth, curving wall; how to proceed? He decided to drive to his mother’s nursing home. That would take most of the day away; his last day. But what else did he have?
He’d spent a lot of time behind a cash register, selling crusty chunks of grease and slithering, cold corn syrup. A fetid ocean of pot smoke had swelled in and out of his lungs. He’d spent some years living with his girthy brother and some summers drinking beer in Yosemite while cleaning hotel rooms. He’d spent a lot of dry, congested hours and some clean green ones. He’d never quite slept deeply enough to dream.
It took about 25 minutes to drive to the home; it was out in the suburbs. It was a house, not an institution. When his father, a hack architect, had died, the family had discovered a large amount of money in a savings account he had not told anyone about, on top of a great deal of cash that he’d squirreled away in his prosthetic leg. The will specified that the money was to be used for his mother’s comfort until after her death. The house was sunny, with flower and vegetable gardens and plenty of attendants.
No one seemed to be home, even though each room was full of one or two quiescent bodies and nurses watching television. Suddenly the thought occurred to him: could she be dead? He felt a frisson of dread. Then: no. She was still there, as always, her rectangular body lying on the bed like a flat sheet of paper. Her knuckles were huge, almost beastly.
“Mom,” he said. She nodded, her face froglike, opening and closing her mouth. “Mom.” He held her hand. By her side was a tray with a glass of water; he sat her up and held it to her lips, gingerly, and she allowed a few drops to pass into her mouth.
“Whatever happened to Suzie?” asked his mother, her voice a rusty hinge. It was the first time she seemed to remember who he was in several months; tears pierced his eyes.
“I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “We aren’t together anymore.”
His mother sighed. “Honey, she was perfect for you.” She seemed to have reached a brief current of clarity, like a pocket of coolness in a stagnant pond. Then she looked at him again. “Whatever happened to her?”
What did his mother remember of Suzie? Was it her languid hair? That dashing red hat she always wore?
This time, he said, “I married her, remember? She would’ve come today, but she had to go to a meeting.”
She frowned a bit, and didn’t say anything. Then: “Are you dating anyone these days?”
He rubbed his face.
“Mom,” he said. He lay his head down next to her on the bed, issuing a crunching rustle from the rubber sheets underneath the soft cotton ones.
Next to her oblivion, he couldn’t help but feel angry, to want to tear at the thin membrane of his existence that clung like a sheet of saran wrap over his face. He felt he could gnash his teeth to splinters.
He lifted his head up. Then he said, “Do you want to go outside?”
She did. He lifted her up and placed her in her large wheelchair, which looked unwieldy and full of legs, like an insect. She felt hollow-boned, oddly buoyant, and fragmentary, like a loose collection of feathers. Her room had French doors that opened out onto the garden.
He lay down on his back next to her large wheeled contraption on the grass. The fool’s gold-colored afternoon felt eerie without the sound of balls bouncing. His insides felt parched, but he made no move to quench himself. A murder of crows crouched together on the grass a little ways away. They all faced the same direction, their backs to him, the wind ruffling their black foliage. The sun lay down on his belly, an intimate gesture. His irritation subsided into a foliage that moved slightly in the breeze. Squirrels unfolded themselves before him, and jays flew overhead like fists opening and closing.
He glanced past the fence; just beyond it was a dog with keen yellow eyes and a brindle coat. Its gaze was frozen to him, sealing him. He felt a spring of fear. Did he see the others loping down a distant hill?
But then, there was nothing to be done; the thought soothed him. He had a little more time. They always gave you one day.
He turned his head to the left. There was his mother’s foot, parched and faded in a terrycloth slipper. For a moment, he stared at the foot, at its blue and yellow sadness. There was only one thing to be done.
He got up and went to her bathroom, which stank but appeared clean with its toilet booster seat. He opened all the cabinets until he found a basin; then he filled it with lavender oil and warm water, testing its temperature carefully.
A moment later, he had manipulated the limbs of her wheel-beast and was easing her feet into warm, scented water. She let out a breath of release.
He looked up to see her staring at the sky and at the starlings in the trees, her hair like piled-up cumulus clouds. The starlings reveled in vigorous profusion, their earthy marsh sounds squirting out like the sound of boots walking through mud. They growled up and down, flirting throatily with the handsome, stolid oak trees.
He rubbed and warmed her feet in the water, watching scales fall away as the flesh grew pink and tender.

Maybe Another

I came down with my worst sickness so far last night, but I'm already much better. I think it was the kids hand in my mouth that did me in. That, or forgetting not to use the sink water to rinse my mouth. 3 hours of sleep and now I'm up and totally out of it. So, here is some more random video clips you can't watch on facebook. agillianandjackadventure.blogspot.com . The party tonight will be at a local French bar right at the main plaza, so If I feel better, that'll be fun. Also, looking forward to Jacob and Jennea getting here on Monday! They are bringing more books Gillian has ordered for the kids (which have been a huge hit so far!) and may even be able to work at the orphanage with us and not in the after school program short-term volunteers usually do. Finally, Lilly, the woman who runs the orphanage, sends all those on Gillian's side of the family who sent money a huge hug of thanks. Just being able to buy enough diapers and clothes for the kids is struggle, so the money will be well spent. Also, money goes along way down here. Much more than even in Ecuador.

OrphaNovela (It's getting harder to make up movie titles.)

Some clips I've taken at the orphanage.

For facebook people, go to agillianandjackadventure.blogspot.com to see it.

Oh and Ben, I'll try and catch you on Skype soon!

Since I'm 26 Now...

For my birthday, we finally tried cuy. Actually, the worst things on that plate there were the green beans, which still smelled like the farm. Cuy isn't bad. It's like a disappointing turkey dinner, very mild. We bought the CD of the band that played, so now we have Hotel California on the flute. Classic.

Baby #3, Vallery. I held her and baby #4 yesterday and they kept hugging and kissing. It was really cute. I then had them in the same crib, but #4 Mariaejenia (or something) kept wanting to walk on Vallery.

John on the left pooped his pants yesterday and didn't want to interrupt playing pogs to go change his pants. John is so stinky.

For some reason, some volunteer thought it a good idea to build a sandbox in the middle of the soccer field, when there is plenty of room off to the side. Then they filled it with something like concrete so the kids get extremely dirty and aren't allowed to play in it. 

Behind the clothes is their collection of dangerous things to put the kids in the hospital with. Weird iron rods and boards with nails they are saving for some reason. Their is Misty, the volcano in the back ground. I dunno if I'm going to get a good picture of it with the new camera since were getting into rainy season soon.

Laundry here is very complex since all their machines are about broken. It's like a 8 step process of washing and rinsing and soaking and spinning and on and on. 

After the kids had kicked two balls into the neighbors yard, I tried to get creative. We did some obstacle courses and then I dug trough the garbage and made a ramp. 

The ramp quickly became a fort made entirely of things from the dangerous pile. The roof was supported by something with wheels, so I stayed close and dismantled it just in time (before the tias saw it). 

Whenever the kids bump their heads, they rub whatever leaves they can find on it.

Feeding time for baby.

New Camera at the Orphanage

The kids were practicing a traditional dance when we got there (last Tuesday the 22nd). I have a video I'll post later. I guess this is a photo of what the kids look like after they dance.

Here is the winner of the best baby contest we held last week, Jorge Luis. They are letting me work with babies now, which I think is a big deal. The tias never let guys in the baby room usually.

Another baby, Camila. Even smaller. We looked into how adoption works and it can take up to 3 years and 20,000 dollars along with a month time in the city, with the baby and working out the legal stuff. Outrageous! We've also been looking into houses and condos to buy hopefully this summer, so we don't waste anymore money on rent. Either in far South East Portland, like 80th, or Multnomah Village.

Someone donated a big plot of land for a new orphanage, but it sounds like they won't take it since it is right by a graveyard. That gave m a good idea for a Steven King book. So, they move the orphanage next to a graveyard and suddenly the kids start waking up covered in dirt. The woman who runs it decides to stay up all night and watch them to see what is going on. At 2:22, she falls asleep but at 3:33 she is awoken by the door opening and a kid sleepwalking back into bed, all dirty. Eventually, they realize these kids are waking up in the graves of their great grandparents, so they move the orphanage. The next morning all the kids are gone. 44 years and 4 months later, they are digging up the road to put in a new children's hospital and they find the bodies, the kids, trapped underground by the concrete. The title maybe should be Dirt, Concrete, and Iron-y.

Camila has started only eating a half ounce at a time, so Gillian is constantly feeding her. 

Not sure how you spell Mariajenia, but she is great. She's learning to walk, which is tough in a concrete house. It hurts my back too!

Gillian listening to the song I'm still making for her for Christmas.

Soccer upstairs is fun until the ball goes into the neighbors house and you have to talk with them. They've never been hoe when it's happened to me, but I've heard stories and man do they hate the orphanage.

The 3rd oldest baby is NOT in this blog, oops. Next time.

The kids love the cameras. They are always wanting to take pictures and see themselves. They also love Help! if I haven't mentioned that enough.

Christmas presents hanging from telephone wires. We saw a lot of Santa Clauses climbing in through windows too.

Christmas Eve was a fun potluck. The stove ran out of gas so we didn't eat until 11:30. The gas guy was not too prompt, as you can imagine. Since around Christmas, everybody has been leaving, so suddenly the house is pretty empty. More are coming in a week or 2.

These pictures aren't the best or good at all, but I wanted to document the night so here you go. Maybe some video of the night is on it's way too. We ate turkey and casseroles and had a real regular, great tasting dinner before (and after) lighting off fireworks and dancing to MIA and Deerhoof. I went and worked at the orphanage on Christmas Day, which was nice (Gillian was kinda sick, which is really sick to the Tia's since she is with the babies, so she lounged in bed). We ate ceviche and played volleyball (kinda) and pogs (more kinda).

The Monastery - More Borrowed Pictures

It's a huge complex built around 400 years ago. It took an 1 1/2 hours to get through the whole thing and see all the rooms. It was common for families to place one daughter in here whether she wanted to or not, so it was common for the women to be having affairs and not living the required lifestyle. A lot of them had servants too. The church made a rule at one point that said they could have one servant max before later disallowing servants all together.

There were many courtyards surrounded with paintings like these on the walls.

The rooms where they cooked were totally black and there were stairs everywhere to the roof. We had some great pictures from up there, but Aaron, our friend from Calgary, didn't have any on his camera, so dang it.

The complex included part of the old city that was next to the monastery. Here's an old Arequipan calle.

I seem to have run out of tidbits. But if you enjoy beauty even half as much as I do, that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Jack's birthday

Hello! It's Jack's birthday. I wrote him this sonnet.

love, Gillian

Husband, know that you have taught me faith

the quiet faith of the migrating goose

or butterfly, rhythmic, full, a calm

beneath passion. I relinquish the reign

of feelings. Sometimes, my trunk is naked,

my branches bare. Yearly, the nests are built,

the young nurtured and fledged. Our wood is still,

and death is only another merging.

With you, I receive my nourishment.

The sun touches me, pulls a fond fragrance

from the moisture that lies snug in my leaves.

It feeds and cleans me, and love hums through me,

vibrating rings of shame, cowardice, sloth.

They crawl forth, drawn out by love and work; sweet relief!

Circus Olame

Our friends from Belgium took some video of the Circus. I think it is kinda funny so I've posted it. I have a lot of stuff to post and Google is giving me problems, but soon there will be a lot from Arequipa and our amazing new camera. For you all on Facebook, go to agillianandjackadventure.blogspot.com to watch.

Borrowed Pictures of the First 2 Weeks in Arequipa

Here is the market. Huge. Everything. Cheap. Crammed. Things teetering on top of things.

The ever-changing group of volunteers at one of our weekly eat pizza and waste time discussing issues that don't need discussion sessions on Tuesday nights. I am the pizza coordinator now. I tried to change the pizza place from Dominos to a local place this week, but the people have spoken and I guess we have to switch back. Since I'm in charge though, I might issue a veto. We'll see.

Plaza de la Armas right in downtown and the big fake Christmas tree.

This is where the cab dropped us off with my backpack still inside.

They have an obsession here with butchering their trees. Always with these ridiculous circle shapes and then they will go and paint the bottom 3 feet of the truck white for good measure. 

Here we are in the auditorium with all the kids, minus the babies, waiting for the circus to start. Peruvian time means add an hour, so we waited forever in there for it to start. JF is right in the front there. He is here from Canada for 6 months, coordinating the volunteering at the orphanage with the woman behind him, Lilly, who runs the orphanage.

Our friends from Belgium cheering me up after the backpack ordeal. These are their pictures. They speak very little English, so it's great Spanish practice to hang out with them.

The nonsense that was the circus.

Monday, Dec. 22: We celebrated Christmas early with the kids and had a huge Christmas feast.

The kids are so great. They are always so happy. It's great fun.

This little guy always falls asleep at the table and is so smelly.

Camila is the tiniest baby of them all.

I spend half my days watching this guy bounce around. I'm always saying Hola Juan and thinking of you dad though I don't remember what movie that's from.

One of the volunteers put that suit on and handed out the kids presents. They all got a new outfit and a doll or something like that. This kid is the only one who cried.