MARIGOLDS

Marigolds

Author:  Eugenia W. Collier

When I think of the home town of my youth, all that I seem to remember is dust – the brown, crumbly dust of late summer – arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes makes them water, gets into the throat and between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why I should remember only the dust.  Surely there must have been lush green lawns and paved streets under leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an abstract painting – it does not present things as they are, but rather as they feel.  And so, when I think of that time and that place, I remember only the dry September of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shanty town where I lived.  And one other thing I remember, another incongruency of memory – a brilliant splash of sunny yellow against the dust – Miss Lottie’s marigolds.

Whenever the memory of those marigolds flashes across my mind, a strange nostalgia come with it and remains long after the picture has faded, I feel again the chaotic emotions of adolescence, illusive as smoke, yet as real as the potted geranium before me now.  Joy and rage and wild animal gladness and shame become tangled together in the multicolored skin of fourteen-going-on fifteen as I recall that devastating moment when I was suddenly more woman than child, years ago in Miss Lottie’s yard.  I think of those marigolds at the strangest time; I remember them vividly now as I desperately pass away the time.

I suppose that futile waiting was the sorrowful background music of our impoverished little community when I was young.  The depression that gripped the nation was no new thing to us, for the black workers of rural waiting for; certainly not for the prosperity that was “just around the corner,” for those were white folk’s words, which we never believed.  Nor we did wait for hard work and thrift to pay off in shining success, as the American Dream promised, for we know better than that, too.  Perhaps we waited for a miracle, amorphous in concept but necessary if one were to have the grit to rise before dawn each day and labor in the white man’s vineyard until after dark, or to wander about in September dust offering some meager share of bread.  But God was chary with miracles in those days, and so we waited – and waited.

We children , of course, were only vaguely aware of the extent of our poverty.  Having no radios, few newspapers, and no magazines, we were somewhat unaware of the world outside our community.  Nowadays we would be called culturally deprived and people would write books and hold conferences about us.  In those days everybody we knew was just as hungry and ill clad as we were.  Poverty was the cage in which we all were trapped, and our hatred of it was still the vague, undirected restlessness of the zoo-bred flamingo who knows that nature created him to fly free.

As I think of those days, I feel most poignantly the tag end of summer, the bright, dry times when we began to have a sense of shortening days and the imminence of the cold.

By time I was fourteen, my brother Joey and I were the only children left at our house, the older ones having left home for early marriage or the lure of the city, and the two babies having been sent to relative who might care for them better than we.  Joey was three years younger than I, and a boy, and therefore vastly inferior.  Each morning our mother and father trudged wearily down the dirt road and around the bend, she to her domestic job, he to his daily unsuccessful quest for work.  After a  few chores around the tumbledown shanty. Joey and I were free to run wild in the sun with other children similarly situated.

For the most part, those days are ill-defined in my memory, running together and combining like a fresh watercolor painting left out in the rain. I remember squatting in the road drawing a picture in the dust, a picture which Joey gleefully erased with one sweep of his dirty foot.  I remember fishing for minnows in a muddy creek and watching sadly as they eluded my cupped hands, while Joey laughed uproariously.  And I remember, that year, a strange restlessness of body and of spirit, a feeling that something old and familiar was ending, and something unknown and therefore terrifying was beginning.

One day returns to me with special clarity for some reason, perhaps because it was the beginning of the experience and in some inexplicable way marked the end of innocence.  I was loafing under the great oak tree in our yard, deep in some reverie which I have now forgotten, except that it involved some secret, secret thoughts of one of the Harris boys across the yard.  Joey and a bunch of kids were bored now with the old tire suspended from an oak limb, which had kept them entertained for a while.

“Hey, Lizabeth,” Joey yelled.  He never talked when he could yell.  “Hey, Lizabeth, let’s go somewhere.”

I came reluctantly from my private world.  “Where you want to go?  What you want to do?”

The truth was that we were becoming tired of the formlessness of our summer days.  The idleness whose prospect had seemed so beautiful during the busy days of spring now had degenerated to an almost desperate effort to fill up the empty midday hours.

“Let’s go see can we find some locusts on the hill,” someone suggested.

Joey was scornful.  “Ain’t no more locusts there.  Y’all got ‘em all while they was still green.”

The argument that followed was brief and not really worth the effort.  Hunting locust trees wasn’t fun anymore by now.

“Tell you what,” said Joey finally, his eyes sparkling.  “Let’s us go over to Miss Lottie’s.”

The idea caught on at once, for annoying Miss Lottie was always fun.  I was still child enough to scamper along with the group over rickety fences and through bushes that tore our already raggedy clothes, back where Miss Lottie lived.  I think  now that we must have a tragicomic spectacle, five or six kids of different ages, each of us clad in only one garment – the girls in faded dresses that were too long or too short, the boys in patchy pants, their sweaty brown chests gleaming in the hot sun.  A little cloud of dust followed our thin legs and bare feet as we tramped over the barren land.

When Miss Lottie’s house came into view we stopped, ostensibly to plan our strategy, but actually to reinforce our courage.  Miss Lottie’s house was the most ramshackle of all our ramshackle homes.  The sun and rain had long since faded its rickety frame siding from while to a sullen gray.

The boards themselves seemed to remain upright not from being nailed together but rather from leaning together, like a house that a child might have constructed from cards.  A brisk wind might have blown it down, and the fact that it was still standing implied a kind of enchantment that was stronger than the elements.  There it stood and as far as I know is standing yet- a gray rotting thing with no porch, no shutters, no steps, set on a cramped lot with no grass, not even any weeds – a monument to decay.

In front of the house in a squeaky rocking chair sat Miss Lottie’s son, John Burke, completing the impression of decay.  John Burke was what was know as queer-headed.  Black and ageless, he sat rocking day in and day out in a mindless stupor, lulled by the monotonous squeak-squawk of the chair.  A battered hat atop his shaggy head shaded him from the sun.  Usually John Burke was totally unaware of everything outside his quiet dream world.  But if you disturbed him if you intruded upon his fantasies, he would become enraged, strike out at you, and curse at you in some strange enchanted language which only he could understand.  We children made a game of thinking of ways to disturb John Burke and then to elude his violent retribution.

But our real fun and our real fear lay in Miss Lottie herself.  Miss Lottie seemed to be at least a hundred years old.  Her big frame still held traces of the tall powerful woman she must have been in youth, although it was now bent and drawn.  Her smooth skin was a dark reddish brown, and her face had Indian-like features and the stern stoicism that one associates with Indian faces.  Miss Lottie didn’t like intruders either, especially children.  She never left her yard, and nobody ever visited her.  We never knew how she managed those necessities which depend on human interaction – how she ate, for example, or even whether she ate.  When we were tiny children, we thought Miss Lottie, was a witch and we made up tales and we half believed ourselves about her exploits.  We were far too sophisticated now, of course, to believe the witch nonsense.  But old fears have a way of clinging like cobwebs, and so when we sighted the tumbledown shack, we had to stop to reinforce our nerves.

“Look, there she is,” I whispered, forgetting that Miss Lottie could not possibly have heard from me from that distance.  “She’s fooling with them crazy flowers.”

“Yeh, look at ’er.”

Miss Lottie’s marigolds were perhaps the strangest part of the picture.  Certainly they did not fit in with the crumbling decay of the rest of her yard.  Beyond the dusty brown yard, in front of the sorry gray house, rose suddenly and shockingly a dazzling strip of bright blossoms, clumped together in enormous mounds, warm and passionate and sun-golden.  The old black with-woman worked on them all summer, every summer down on her creaky knees, weeding and cultivating and arranging, while the house crumbled and John Burke rocked.  For some perverse reason, we children hated those marigolds.  They interfered with the perfect ugliness of the place; they were too beautiful; they said too much that we could not understand; they did not make sense.  There was something in the vigor with which the  old woman destroyed the weeds that intimidated us.  It should have been a comical sight – the old woman with the man’s hat on her cropped white head, leaning over the bright mounds, her big backside in the air – but it wasn’t comical, it was something we could not name.  We had to annoy her by whizzing a pebble into her flowers or by yelling a dirty world, then dancing away from her rage, reveling in our youth and mocking her age.  Actually, I think it was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to think it was the flowers we wanted to destroy, but nobody had the nerve to try it, not even Joey, who was usually fool enough to try anything.

“Y’all git some stones,” commanded Joey now and was met with instant giggling obedience as everyone except me began to gather pebbles from the dusty ground.  “Come on,  Lizabeth.”

I just stood there peering through the bushes, torn between wanting  to join the fun and feeling that it was all a bit silly.

“You scared, Lizabeth?”

I cursed and spat on the ground – my favorite gesture of phony bravado.  “Y’all children get the stones, I’ll show you how to use ‘em.”

I said before that we children were not consciously aware of how thick were the bars of our cage. I wonder now, though, whether we were not more aware of it than I thought.  Perhaps we had some dim notion of what we were, and how little chance we had of being anything else.  Otherwise, why would we have been so preoccupied with destruction?  Anyway, the pebbles were collected quickly, and everybody looked at me to begin the fun.

“Come on, y’all.”

We crept on the edge of the bushes that bordered the narrow road in frond of Miss Lottie’s photo place.  She was working placidly, kneeling over the flowers, her dark hand plunged into the golden mound.  Suddenly zing – an expertly aimed stone cut the head off one of the blossoms.

“Who out there?”  Miss Lottie’s backside came down and her head came up as her sharp eyes searched the bushes.  “You better git!”

We had crouched down out of sight in the bushes, where we stifled the giggle that insisted on coming, Miss Lottie gazed warily across the road for a moment, then cautiously returned to her weeding.  Zing – Joey sent a pebble into the blooms, and another marigold was beheaded.

Miss Lottie was enraged now.  She began struggling to her feet, leaning on rickety cane and shouting.  “Y’all git! Go on home!”  Then the rest of the kids let loose with their pebbles, storming the flowers and laughing wildly and senselessly at Miss Lottie’s impotent rage.  She took her stick at us and started shakily toward the road crying, “Git ‘long John Burke!  John Burke, come help!”

Then I lost my head entirely, mad with the power of inciting such rage and ran out of the bushes in the storm pebbles, straight toward Miss Lottie, changing madly, “Old witch, fell in a ditch, picked up a penny and thought she was rich!”  The children screamed with delight, dropped their pebbles, and joined the crazy dance, swarming around Miss Lottie like bees and changing, “Old lady witch!” while she screamed curses at us.  The madness lasted only a moment for John Burke, startled at last, lurched out of his chair, and we dashed for the bushes just as Miss Lottie’s cane went whizzing at my head.

I did not join the merriment when the kids gathered again under the oak in our bare yard.  Suddenly I was ashamed, and I did not like being ashamed.  The child in me sulked and said it was all in fun, but the woman in me flinched at the thought of the malicious attack that I had led.  The mood lasted all afternoon.  When we ate the beans and rice that was supper that night, I did not notice my father’s silence, for he was always silent these days, nor did I notice my mother’s absence, for she always worked until well into evening.  Joey and I had a particularly bitter argument after supper; his exuberance got on my nerves.  Finally I stretched out upon the pallet in the room we shared and fell into a fitful doze.  When I awoke, somewhere in the middle of the night, my mother had returned, and I vaguely listened to the conversation that was audible through the thin walls that separated our rooms.  At first, I heard no words, only voices.  My mother’s voice was like a cool, dark room in summer – peaceful, soothing, quiet.  I loved to listen to it; it made things seem all right somehow.  But my father’s voice cut through hers, shattering the peace.

“Twenty-two years, Maybelle, twenty-two years,” he was saying, “and I got nothing for you, nothing, nothing.”

“It’s all right, honey, you’ll get something.  Everybody out of work now, you know that.”

“It ain’t right.  Ain’t no man ought to  eat his woman’s food year in and year out, and see his children running wild.  Ain’t nothing right about that.”

“Honey, you took good care of us when you had it.  Ain’t nobody got nothing nowadays.”

“I ain’t talking about nobody else, I’m talking about me.  God knows I try.”  My mother said something I could not hear, and my father cried out louder, “What must a man do, tell me that?”

“Look, we ain’t starving.  I get paid every week, and Mrs. Ellis is real nice about giving me things.  She gonna let me have Mr. Ellis’s old coat for you this winter –“

“Damn Mr. Elli’s coat! And damn his money!  You think I want white folks’ leavings?  Damn, Maybelle” – and suddenly he sobbed, loudly and painfully, and cried helplessly and hopelessly in the dark night.  I had never heard a man cried before.  I did not know men ever cried.  I covered my ears with my hand but could not cut off the sound of my father’s harsh, painful, despairing sobs.  My father was a strong man who could whisk a child upon his shoulders and go singing through the house.  My father whittled toys for us, and laughed so loud that the great oak seemed to laugh with him, and taught us how to fish and hunt rabbits.  How could it be that my father was crying?  But the sobs went on, unstifled, finally quieting until I could hear my mother’s voice, deep and rich, humming softly as she used to hum to a frightened child.

The world had lost its boundary lines.  My mother, who was small and soft, was now the strength of the family; my father who was the rock on which the family had been built, was sobbing like the tiniest child.  Everything was suddenly out of tune, like a broken accordion.  Where did I fit into this crazy picture?  I do not now remember my thoughts, only a feeling of great bewilderment and fear.

Long after the sobbing and humming had stopped, I lay on the pallet, still as stone with my hand over my ears, wishing that I too could cry and be comforted.  The night was silent now except for the sound of the crickets and of Joey’s soft breathing.  But the room was too crowded with fear to allow me to sleep, and finally, feeling the terrible aloneness of 4A.M., I decided to awaken Joey.

“Ouch! What’s the matter with you?  What you want?”  He demanded disagreeably when I had pinched and slapped him awake.

“Come on, wake up.”

“What for?  Go ‘way.”

I was lost of a reasonable reply, I could not say.  “I’m scared and I don’t want to be alone,” so I merely said, “I ‘m going out.  If you want to come, come on.”

I was pulling my dress over my head.  Until now I had not thought of going out.  “Just come on,”  I replied tersely.

I was out the window and halfway down the road before Joey caught up with me.

“Wait, Lizabeth, where you going?”

I was running as if the Furies were after me, as perhaps they were – running silently and furiously until I came to where I had half known I was headed:  to Miss Lottie’s yard.

The half-dawn light was more eerie than complete darkness, and in it the old house was like the ruin that my world had become – foul and crumbling, a grotesque caricature.  It looked haunted, but I was not afraid, because I was haunted too.

“Lizabeth, you lost your mind?”  panted Joey.

I had indeed lost my mind, for all the smoldering emotions of that summer swelled in me and burst – the great need for my mother who was never there, the hopelessness of our poverty and degradation, the bewilderment of being neither child nor woman and yet both at once, the fear unleashed by my father’s tears.  And these feelings combined in one great impulse toward destruction.

“Lizabeth!”

I leaped furiously into the mounds of marigold and pulled madly, trampling and pulling and destroying the perfect yellow blooms.  The fresh smell of early morning and of dew-soaked marigolds spurred me on as I went gearing and mangling the sobbing while Joey tugged my dress or my waist crying, “Lizabeth, stop, please stop!”

And then I was sitting in the ruined little garden among the uprooted and ruined flowers, crying and crying, and it was too late to undo what I had done.  Joey was sitting beside me, silent and frightened, not knowing what to say.  Then, “Lizabeth, look.”

I opened my swollen eyes and saw in front of me a pair of large, calloused feet; my gaze lifted to the swollen legs, the age-distorted body clad in a tight cotton nightdress, and then the shadowed Indian face surrounded by stubby white hair.  And there was no rage in the face now, now that the garden was destroyed and there was nothing any longer to be protected.

“M –Miss Lottie!”  I scrambled to my feet and just stood there and stared at her, and that was the moment when childhood faded and womanhood began.  That violent, crazy act was the last act of childhood.  For as I gazed at the immobile face with the sad, weary eyes, I gazed upon a kind of reality which is hidden to childhood.  The witch was no longer a witch but only a broken old woman who had dared to create beauty in the midst of ugliness and sterility.  She had been born in squalor and lived in it all her life.  Now at the end of that life she had nothing except a falling-down hut,  a wrecked body, and John Burke, the mindless son of her passion.  Whatever verve there was left in her, whatever was of love and beauty and joy that had not been squeezed out by life, had been there in the marigolds she had so tenderly cared for.

Of course I could not express the things that I knew about Miss Lottie as I stood there awkward and  ashamed.  The years have put words to the things I knew in that moment marked the end of innocence.  Innocence involves an unseeing acceptance of things at face value, an ignorance of the area below the surface.  In that humiliating moment I had looked beyond myself and into the depths of another person.  This was the beginning of compassion, and one cannot have both compassion and innocence.

The years have taken me worlds away from that time and that place, from the dust and squalor of our lives, and from the bright thing that I destroyed in a blind, childish striking out at God knows what.  Miss Lottie died long ago and many years have passed since I last saw her hut, completely barren at last, for despite my wild contrition she never planted marigolds again.  Yet, there are times when the image of those passionate yellow mounds returns with a painful poignancy.  For one does not have to be ignorant and poor to find that his life is as barren as the dusty yards of our town.  And I too have planted marigolds. 

SpringBoard. English Textual Power. The College Board’s official Pre-AP program

 /posted on january 2014. http://iwrotefiction.blogspot.com

ARABY by James Joyce

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ARABY by James Joyce

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste room behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers. Among these I found a few paper-covered books, the pages of which were curled and damp: The Abbot, by Walter Scott, The Devout Communicant, and The Memoirs of Vidocq. I liked the last best because its leaves were yellow. The wild garden behind the house contained a central apple-tree and a few straggling bushes, under one of which I found the late tenant's rusty bicycle-pump. He had been a very charitable priest; in his will he had left all his money to institutions and the furniture of his house to his sister.

When the short days of winter came, dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan's sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan's steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.

Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.

One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: 'O love! O love!' many times.

At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar; she said she would love to go.

'And why can't you?' I asked.

While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps, and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.

'It's well for you,' she said.

'If I go,' I said, 'I will bring you something.'

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days. I chafed against the work of school. At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read. The syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me. I asked for leave to go to the bazaar on Saturday night. My aunt was surprised, and hoped it was not some Freemason affair. I answered few questions in class. I watched my master's face pass from amiability to sternness; he hoped I was not beginning to idle. I could not call my wandering thoughts together. I had hardly any patience with the serious work of life which, now that it stood between me and my desire, seemed to me child's play, ugly monotonous child's play.

On Saturday morning I reminded my uncle that I wished to go to the bazaar in the evening. He was fussing at the hallstand, looking for the hat-brush, and answered me curtly:

'Yes, boy, I know.'

As he was in the hall I could not go into the front parlour and lie at the window. I felt the house in bad humour and walked slowly towards the school. The air was pitilessly raw and already my heart misgave me.

When I came home to dinner my uncle had not yet been home. Still it was early. I sat staring at the clock for some time and, when its ticking began to irritate me, I left the room. I mounted the staircase and gained the upper part of the house. The high, cold, empty, gloomy rooms liberated me and I went from room to room singing. From the front window I saw my companions playing below in the street. Their cries reached me weakened and indistinct and, leaning my forehead against the cool glass, I looked over at the dark house where she lived. I may have stood there for an hour, seeing nothing but the brown-clad figure cast by my imagination, touched discreetly by the lamplight at the curved neck, at the hand upon the railings and at the border below the dress.

When I came downstairs again I found Mrs Mercer sitting at the fire. She was an old, garrulous woman, a pawnbroker's widow, who collected used stamps for some pious purpose. I had to endure the gossip of the tea-table. The meal was prolonged beyond an hour and still my uncle did not come. Mrs Mercer stood up to go: she was sorry she couldn't wait any longer, but it was after eight o'clock and she did not like to be out late, as the night air was bad for her. When she had gone I began to walk up and down the room, clenching my fists. My aunt said:

'I'm afraid you may put off your bazaar for this night of Our Lord.'

At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey in the hall door. I heard him talking to himself and heard the hallstand rocking when it had received the weight of his overcoat. I could interpret these signs. When he was midway through his dinner I asked him to give me the money to go to the bazaar. He had forgotten.

'The people are in bed and after their first sleep now,' he said.

I did not smile. My aunt said to him energetically:

'Can't you give him the money and let him go? You've kept him late enough as it is.'

My uncle said he was very sorry he had forgotten. He said he believed in the old saying: 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.' He asked me where I was going and, when I told him a second time, he asked me did I know The Arab's Farewell to his Steed. When I left the kitchen he was about to recite the opening lines of the piece to my aunt.

I held a florin tightly in my hand as I strode down Buckingham Street towards the station. The sight of the streets thronged with buyers and glaring with gas recalled to me the purpose of my journey. I took my seat in a third-class carriage of a deserted train. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river. At Westland Row Station a crowd of people pressed to the carriage doors; but the porters moved them back, saying that it was a special train for the bazaar. I remained alone in the bare carriage. In a few minutes the train drew up beside an improvised wooden platform. I passed out on to the road and saw by the lighted dial of a clock that it was ten minutes to ten. In front of me was a large building which displayed the magical name.

I could not find any sixpenny entrance and, fearing that the bazaar would be closed, I passed in quickly through a turnstile, handing a shilling to a weary-looking man. I found myself in a big hall girded at half its height by a gallery. Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognized a silence like that which pervades a church after a service. I walked into the centre of the bazaar timidly. A few people were gathered about the stalls which were still open. Before a curtain, over which the words Café Chantant were written in coloured lamps, two men were counting money on a salver. I listened to the fall of the coins.

Remembering with difficulty why I had come, I went over to one of the stalls and examined porcelain vases and flowered tea-sets. At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.

'O, I never said such a thing!'

'O, but you did!'

'O, but I didn't!'

'Didn't she say that?'

'Yes. I heard her.'

'O, there's a... fib!'

Observing me, the young lady came over and asked me did I wish to buy anything. The tone of her voice was not encouraging; she seemed to have spoken to me out of a sense of duty. I looked humbly at the great jars that stood like eastern guards at either side of the dark entrance to the stall and murmured:

'No, thank you.'

The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.

I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.

Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.

posted by rosevoc on iwrotefiction

A BRIGHT CHRISTMAS TO ALL!

Ispiritu Sa Cake

Pag-aari ng pamiliyang Santos ang Bakery 1528.

Ang pamilyang Santos ay may tatlong anak. Si Mayra at Clara ay anak ni Criselda sa unang asawa, at si Diana, ang pinakabata, ay ang tunay na anak ni Domingo. Balo si Domingo. Ang ina ni Diana ang dating nagmamay-ari ng Bakery 1528.

“Tatay, ano po ba ang hulma ng cake na gagawin ko para bukas sa anniversary?”

“Bahala ka anak, basta kulay puti ang gusto ng mag-asawang Zoan.”

“Ah sige po. Marahil ay hugis puso ang gagawin ko para sa kanila.”

“Mabuti pa nga.”

“Ang arte arte mo naman, tatanong-tanong ka pa, e ikaw din pala ang sasagot sa tanong mo,” ang pasaring na bulong ni Myra.

“Ano ba ang gusto mo Ate?”

“Ewan!” Pasigaw ni Myra.

Si Clara naman ay kain ng kain ng mga panindang tinapay sa bakery, habang pinupuno ni Criselda ang plato ng iba’t – ibang masasarap na pastry at mga tinapay.

“Myra, ano ang gusto mong ipa-bake kay Diana?”

“Mommy, gusto ko po ng chocolate cake na maraming bulaklak.”

Sige anak. Hoy! Diana igawa mo nga ng chocolate cake itong mga kapatid mo!”

“Opo, Tiya.”

Kahit pagod sa pagluluto si Diana ay sunod pa rin sa nanay-nanayan. Si Diana lamang at walang katulong ang nagtatrabahao sa Bakery 1528. Minsan tinutulungan siya ni Mang Domingo.

Ngunit madalas ay siya lamang sapagkat ayaw ni Criselda na siya ay mag-amoy pugon.

Minsan nag-bake si Diana ng cake para sa kaarawan ng ama. Nakita ito ni Cirselda at ni Myra. Inggit na inggit ang mag-ina.


“Wow! Ano yan?” Tanong ni Criselda.

“Cake po para kay Tatay.”

Nginudgod ni Criselda si Diana at isinubsob ni Myra sa cake na ginawa.

Humagulhol ng malakas si Diana at sumigaw ng “Inay ko po. Nanay, Nanay!”

Nakita sila ni Clara ngunit wala naming magawa sa hindi maawat na pananakit nina Criselda at Myra.

Maya-maya umusok ang pugon. Tumunog at nag-ingay ang oven, nagsi-galaw ang mga hulmahan ng cake.

Ang ilaw ay patay-sindi, at ang icing sa mga cake ay nangagsi-tunaw.

Ang icing ay tumalsik sa mukha at dumikit kina Criselda at Myra, hanggang sa hindi sila ay tinabunang parang tinapay

“Patawad po, patawad po,” ang sigaw ni Clara.

“Inay, tama napo – bayaan ninyo na sila, bahala na ang Langit” sabi ni Diana

Nagpumilit tumayo si Criselda at Myra at takot na takot na lumabas sa bakery 1528.

Mula noon ay nagbago ang mag-ina sa pagtrato kay Diana. Ang bakery 1528 ay nagkaroon naman ng marami pang ibat-ibang cake sa tulong ng Ispirito sa cake.

/rose flores martinez, 08062006
http"//iwrotefiction.blogspot.com

Chat

CHAT

Alas dose ng hatinggabi: Chat time naming ni Bruce.

Antok na ‘ko hintay ko pa rin siya. Wala kasi ‘kong lagging kausap. Ewan ko nga kung bakit ako nagityangang makipag-usap sa isang taong hindi ko pa nakikita. Feeling ko kasi, napakabait niya.

Minsan nagkaroon ako ng ga-daigdig na problema. Akala ko ‘nun magbibiti na ‘ko. Bumagsak kasi ako sa Forensic subject namin. Hiyang-hiya ako sa bahay. “Lam kasi ng lahat iskolar ako. Pero si Bruce – binigyan niya ako ng pag-asa. Hindi niya ako kinutya at hinusgahan sa nakuha kong mababang grade sa iskwela.

Buzz!

Ayan na si Bruce.

“How are you?” (Kumusta ka?) bungad sa ‘kin.

“I’m good.” (Mabuti ako.) And you? (Ikaw?)

Ganyan kami mag-usap ni Bruce.

Amerikano si Bruce kaya “speaking in dollars kami. Tuwing chat time namin, okay lang ako ng okay kasi hindi ako masyadong magaling sa Ingles – tapos tamad pa akong magsulat … Pero, feel ko si Bruce.

Ikinukuwento ko siya sa aking mga kaibigan. Sabi nila, nasisiraan na raw ako ng bait kasi, baka manloloko raw ‘yun tapos hindi ko naman kilala at nagtitiwala ako.

Hindi ba uso na ngayon and internet? “yung iba nga sa internet nakakahanap ng trabaho, ng mga nawawalang kaklase, at ‘yung iba nga – asawa pa ang nahahanap.

Nakita ko ang litrato ni Bruce, okay lang. Matangkad at luntian ang mga mata. Parang X-men. Kung. Kung bakit hanging sa internet, sa mata pa rin ako nakatutok. Nag-save ako sa PC ko ng litrato niya para lagi ko siyang naaalala kasi kaibigan ko siya. Tanging kaibigan.

SI Bruce din raw – may printed na litrato ko sa kanyang wallet, syempre sa PC din niya.

Tuwing mag-uusap kami sinasabi ko sa kanyang “take care” at “God bless.” Tuwang tuwa siya sa akin kasi raw, mabait ako. Heheheh – kung alam lang niya na ako ay suplapda. Takot nga sa akin ang mga lalaki, kahit ang mga kaklase kong magpupulis.

At siya naman sugar ang tawag sa akin. Wow ang sweet! Pwede rin pala akong maging pusong babae at sweet. Minsan may itinanong siya sa akin at sinagot ko naman siya ng walang pasumbali – noon, parang nakadama ako ng pag-ibig.

Mula noon si Bruce na ang aking araw at gabi.

Ganito pala ang bagong teknologi. Sa isip lang- kaintindihan na. Walang malisya si Bruce, kaya nga, minahal ko na yata siya ng totohanan. Hangang sa natapos ako sa kolehiyo ng walang boyfriend.

Minsan habang ako ay kumakain ng donut, alas diyes pa lamang ng gabi kumalantog ang PC ko. Sa isip ko baka may dumagan. Tiningnan ko ang paligid, wala naman. Itinuloy ko ang pagkain ng aking donut.

Naku! Ang PC ko parang nag-spark … Naisip kong bigla si Bruce.

Mag-oonline na nga ‘ko.

Maaga pa, pero … ‘Yun connected na.

Nag-surf ako sa internet – ano ba at puro ospital ang lumalabas sa screen. Search ako, at ‘yun pa ring mga ospital ang nasa monitor.

Pero sige, magbabasa na lang ako tungkol sa Forensic subject naming. Naghintay ako ng alas dose para sa chat time naming ni Bruce. Miss ko na tuloy si Bruce.

Ngunit, alas dose na wala pa siya.

Naghintay ako hanggang ala-una.

Hangang alas dos pa.

Ewan, inaantok na ‘ko. Pero parang matindi ang aking lungkot.

Ayan! Ringggg, si Bruce tumatawag.

Sa kabilang linya – “Sorry,” ang sabi ng tinig. Pagkatapos nawala si Bruce.

May email na dumating sa akin. Sulat galling kay Bruce, pirma ng Mommy niya. Patay na raw si Bruce, dinala nila sa ospital dahil sa asthma attack kaninang umaga.

Copyright Rose Flores – Martinez, August 12, 2006
/published 10.7.2009

December 9. Sa Gulod ng Makiling

Sa Gulod ng Makiling

Sa gulod ng Makiling ay maraming kakakibang bulaklak. Mala-bahaghari ang mga kulay nito, at iba’t ibang klase ang mga bulaklak. Ang kuwento ng mga taga-makiling ay may matandang maputi ang buhok na nagdidilig ng mga bulaklak tuwing hatinggabi.

Minsan may isang dalagang pumitas ng abuhing makintab na mga rosas. Ibinigay raw ito ng dalaga sa Nanay niyang may sakit. Gumaling ang Nanay. Ang pinag-pitasan ng mga abuhing rosas ay nagkaroon pa ng maraming suloy at mga sanga.

Tuwang-tuwang raw ang matandang sa gulod.

Minsan naman ay isang bata ang kumuha ng mga orchids para ipalamuti sa grotto ni Santa Maria sa kanilang bahay. Umusbong raw sa paligid ng bakuran ang mga orchids. Tuwang-tuwa uli ang matanda at lalong walang patid ang pagdidilig gabi-gabi. Marami raw ang nakakakita sa ibayong pagdidilig ng matanda na mga taga-Makiling.

Takot lamang silang lumapit dahil kapag nagdidilig raw ang matanda ay madulas sa gulod at may napipilayan sa pagkakadapa. Nahihirapang makalakad muli.

Ngunit minsan isang hapon ay may isang binatang dayuhang pumitas ng mga bulaklak at inialay sa isang kasintahang dalaga. Ang pinagpitasan raw nito ay nangamatay. Bumaho raw ang paligid ng isang araw. Ang dalagang pinagbigyan ay nagka-sakit ay namatay ng tuluyan. Ang dahilan: Hindi nagging tapat ang binata sa dalaga. Hindi nila alam ang nangyari sa binata at may balitang nawala siya sa kanilang tirahan.

Kaya ingat na ingat ang mga taga-Makiling pumitas ng mga bulaklak sa gulod sapagkat magkamali raw ng pagbibigyan o ang magibibgay ay may kasamang mahigpit na babala ang matandang nagdidilig gabi-gabi.

Nag-usyoso ako sa gulod. Sinubukan kong pumitas ng isang malusog at kaakit-akit na bulaklak. Naghintay ako ng dilim, wala naming tao. Marami pa akong pinitas, para akong namili galing Baguio o Dangwa.



Itinanim ko sa bahay ampunan ng mga madre ang ibang sanga. Sabi sa bahay ampunan lumago raw ang mga itinanim na bulaklak at inaalagaang mabuti ng mga bata. Pagbalik ko sa gulod nakita ko ang pinagkunang lalong sagana sa bulaklak. Totoong ngang nakabungad ang kumpol kumpol na mga bulaklak at maraming basang damit sa gilid. Kinuha ko ang ilang damit. Dinala ko sa mga madre. At simula noon tuluyang nawala na raw ang matanda sa gulod.

Aug 18, 2006
copyright Rose Flores - Martinez
revised 11.19.2009

The Motive For Metaphor

December 7. Mata Sa Bintana

Mata Sa Bintana

Sabi ng katulong naming si Ate Liza, kapag hindi raw ako natulog ng maaga ay may dudungaw sa bintanang mga mata.

Sino? Mata ba ni Spiderman o mata ni Bubbles ng Power Puff?

“Hindi raw nakakatawa dahil mga mata raw ng White Lady.”

Sa bahay kasi, laging pinagbibintangan ang White Lady, dahil sa White Lady… Minsan naawa na ako sa White Lady. Siguro kung makapagssasalita lang siya, lagot silang lahat. Ako lang ang kaibigna ng White Lady.

Minsan, nawala ang pera ni Tiya Azon, at wala naming pumasok na ibang tao sa bahay. Nag-usap usap sila.

Sino ang kumuha? Wala naman, may nagtago raw.

Pagkapos isang gabi sabi ni Tiya Azon may isang babaeng mahaba ang buhok sa paanan ng kanyang kama. Mala-rosas ang mga mata, na gustong makipagti-titigan, sabay naglahong mabilis. Nakatinging raw sa kay Tiya Azon. Kung ganon hindi lamang kami ang nakatira sa bahay. Mabuti malaki ang bahay dahil pati ang White Lady at ang kanyang pamilya ay may magandang tirahan. Lumaki ako sa ganitong kapaligiran.

Isang gabi tumitingin ako sa album ni Tiya Aon. Naramdaman kong malamig at mainit sa silid niya. Nag-jacket ako, pag-katapos hinubad itong muli para buksan ang electric fan.

Binalikan ko ang mga larawan at nakita kong ito ay nasa ilalim nang kama at wala na sa tabi ko.

Ininilipad ba ito ng electric fan?

“Ate Liza” matututlog na ako. Halika at samahan mo akong matulog.”

Mula noon, abot langit ang aking dasal para sa mga kaluluwa, para sa maga ispiritu, para sa mga White Lady. Marahil sa takot.

Bilog ang buwan. Sa azoteya ako nakatulog – nanaginip ako, may mata sa azoteya. Ityon na yata ang sinasabi ni Ate Liza…

.Umusok sa paligid ng itim, , may malaking mama, walang mukha. Hindi ako makahinga, wari’y ungol ng ungol para magising. Alam ko ako’y natutulog, alam ko ako ay binbangungot.

Kahit sa pikit kong mga mata at tulog na katawan, sa aking isip ako ay gising. Paulit-ulit kong dinasal ang Aba Ginoong Maria at isinigaw ang Lord! Jesus! Jesus!

Dito bumalikwas ako sa gising. Parang sinuntok ng malakas at naglaho ang maitim na mama sa aking panaginip.

Wala nang mata sa bintana.

Wala na ang White Lady.

Marahil kung ano man ang kailangan nila dito sa aming bhay, hindi ko alam – at hindi na importante.

Ang sabi ko sa aking mga kasambahay, kay Tiya Azon, at kay Ate Liza ay magdasal sila, ipagdasal ang mga taong hindi natin nakikita. Dasal ang kailangan ng mga mata sa bintana. Dasal ang kailangan nating lahat.

8.11.2006
copyright rose flores martinez
revised 11.19.2009

Imagine Dragons

On December 6. The Miracle

THE MIRACLE


By Rosalinda Flores and Ben Crisp



The coffee was still too hot, so I cradled the foam cup between my knees and lit my last cigarette.

My last ever, I promised myself, as I had done the day before.

The park was mostly empty. The sun had not yet crept above the horizon, to burn the dirty greyness from the dawn sky, and it would be at least an hour before the rest of the city left the their homes to brave another miserable taglamig day outside.

There had been reports of another journalist shot in Manila. I had long grown used to such news, acknowledging it with a kind of postured indifference that my ex-girlfriend had found no comfort in. It didn’t matter to her that I was relegated to the smallest sections of the sports pages; I was white, and besides, could not an outraged sports fan be just as violent as a vengeful gangster or deranged terrorist? She was probably right. Still, I found comfort in my own sense of insignificance. Speaking barely a word of Filipino, and – some had argued – only just enough English to get by, I would never rise to the ranks of martyrdom like my braver, more talented brethren. I may have been white, but with no money, no connections and no friends I was worth nothing to anyone.

A familiar figure appeared from behind the trees that formed the arched entrance to the park. She always wore yellow dresses, or perhaps the same yellow dress, that danced beneath her knees. She was pretty, or at least she gave an impression of prettiness from across a distance too far to know for sure. She meandered, indecisive, between the benches scattered beneath pines that brushed the air in the morning breeze, before choosing the one she always chose.

It faced the statue of the Madonna that stood upon a plinth in the centre of a small pond. It was a simple carving, as they all were; achieving no greatness in aesthetic or skill. The virgin’s head tilted to one side, serenely, eyes opened wide and her hands stretched out in blessing - not, as it had always appeared to me, shrugging as if to say: what?

To the pinay in her yellow dress she was captivating. She sat before the statue, alternating between long, lingering stares and moments with head bowed, eyes closed, I guessed, though I was too far away to know.

I sipped my coffee and watched her watching the Madonna, killing time as I waited for my day to begin.



There was no place to go, but here.

I was raging as always, to imperfections. As such, at least, be perfect in front of this holy woman.

Something stirred into my memory, while I uttered chants I couldn’t even understand. So, this holy woman people called their mother, and the Catholics believed to be the mother of Christ, had always stunned me. No, she did not stun me like ghosts scared, but her benevolence scared my sins and inspired me to hope. At least, in this way, I could re-organize my undecided life.

At least, I’d be prim in front of her, confident in front of her; complete. Apart from my whoring affairs to get money, I wished some guy would come back for me, as my yellow dress meant waiting.

In a few weeks, my boyfriend, a married man, would decide whether to marry me and annul their marriage, or leave me for his wife. Of all the men in my life, I just got into material quests so I could sustain my falling business, but this married man was different because he thrilled my every need, other than desire.

We’ve been on and off this love affair for two years now, and I could see how he craved for my being, because of his maid wife. “My wife compared to your diplomas is only good for a housekeeper,” he told me.

And so, I summoned him. “You must choose between me and your wife.” In a few weeks, I hoped, he’d be back to cuddle me and present me a diamond engagement ring.

A yellow dress would be good to wear all the time! I’d go for this good luck hype.

“Oh, would you always come back for me, Madonna?”

In my thoughts I chanted, “My boy friend would come back for me; heaven might let the maid wife curse me, but what can I do? I have to steal something to love me, or else I won’t stop whoring. Who would come back for me? Maybe, a thousand other men, to prance on my neck and mark it “Hey, I’ve got your ass, too.” Will I be punished for ruining a sacred matrimony or stealing a father?

In this place, was something more real and tender. “Love me tender, love me sweet… Oh, my love complete,” I hummed. After my love affairs, here was the only concrete and beautiful thing.

Across the benches, of this, which I called a sanctuary, were a few others who breathed solace like me. Perhaps. One could be on a fitness program, another read a newspaper, and still another guy, sipped his brew. This guy, sipping his brew, could be thinking nuts like me. Or could he be thanking the magnificence of another day, while he looked up the sky, bowed low for his cup, and darted again, in front this Madonna?

Or would he look at me, too? His gaze was flaming hot. For what thoughts, he could have sensed my urgent pleading to this holy statue, sublime in simplicity and honesty. “Well, we’re flesh and bones, but if for moments, we could be holy,” an old priest said that during the mass I had attended when I was younger, so once in a lifetime I had been serious in the temples; so once pure, I was, before I came into this labyrinth. Would my pleadings echo around?

I caught him looking into nothingness, unconscious maybe, when he glanced into my space and my confused efforts. That time, when he raised his cup, swallowed and sipped again, I thought he was a handsome bum.



It must be nice, I thought, to have some sort of certainty in life.

To be able to look to a faith to guide you when reality – that deluge of chaos that tears at the flesh and soul – is inescapable. Or maybe she just liked the statue.

More people began to trickle into the park. The illusion that this was my place began to fade, like it always did, as the sun drew long shadows on the ground; soon it would be time for work. Once I had enjoyed the anonymity of living in a big foreign city. Now, I feared, solitude was decaying into loneliness and I felt myself disappearing into the crowds that lined the streets each day.

She finished or paused whatever thoughts had held her and stood up to leave, as though in a sudden hurry.

Was this my life? Watching others from outside a window like a child at a pet store?

It took a moment for me to notice the sliver of yellow beneath the bench. Curious, I stood and walked slowly across the park to the space in the front of the statue. The impassive Madonna did not turn to look at me as I entered her periphery, and when I stooped to inspect I saw it was a silk summer scarf that had fallen from the bench; that same canary hue of the woman’s dress.

She was already at the end of the park, turning left out of the gates without looking back. The scarf in one hand, my other reached into its pocket to retrieve my phone.

comedwn sick. mybe flu. srry. tlk 2morrow.

I had taken three sick days in four years. Whatever else that devotion to such a badly paying job might be called, I reasoned, it wasn’t the symptom of a well man.

I quickened my pace not quite to a jog and scanned the streets when I reached the gates. For a moment I thought I had lost her until I spied a flash of yellow amidst a crowd of pedestrians moving across an intersection two blocks down. The traffic closed after them like parted waters and I waited, tense.

Overloaded trucks and bikes whined past at high speed in the dangerous dance of weaving engines that only the Filipinos can survive. A group of wiry children aligned at the curb next to me, chattering like squirrels, watching the road with unblinking eyes and gesturing to each other with their hands. They were preparing to cross. I watched them watching the cars, and when they darted out I sucked in a breath and ran with them.

Horns blared all around me, and I felt the thundering slabs of steel rush by close enough to feel the heat from their choking and spluttering motors, but after a few terrifying moments we were across safely – the children giggling and pointing at the idiotic white man.

The woman had vanished from sight, and I spent a few moments striding between street corners, standing on the tips of my toes as I scanned the faceless crowds for her. Then the yellow dress peeked out through gaps in the crowd ahead of me, and I moved again in her direction, pushing my way past the suits and the sneakers and the cell phones and sunglasses.

I followed her to a street lined with townhouses – the angular, rendered townhouses for people with the money to pay others to choose their tastes for them. I had gained enough ground now to call out to her from the other side of the street, but I caught myself when she stopped in front of a high stone wall to push the button on an intercom panel.

She spoke for only a moment and waited for a response, then the courtyard door must have been unlatched from within because she pushed it open quickly and stepped inside.

I was alone, on that lush and empty street, the scarf still wrapped in my hands.

As the days had been stressful, good times were numbered.

Friends came and disappeared. When people smelled you could not give enough, they stayed away. If they could not get anything from you or suck anything from you, merry days would be over; you would be out of the circle. See I’m out? They smelled they couldn’t get much from me.

“Good morning, Miss!”

Where is he?

“Please see him in the living room.”

He was sitting in his wheel chair. He was reading the newspaper and a glass of water was on the table. Postcards were scattered, a record book, and medals of his faith. He was supposed to be a priest, but due to weak health, he didn’t get it through. Instead, he ventured on a business that earned him a fortune.

I always borrowed from this man, and he was the only one who didn’t tax me. As people could see outside, he lived in luxury – but his heart, it was benevolent to any creature who would seek his help. The only thing that he asked from me was to help him on his records and choose medals for him, which I really liked. He collected stones, as well; precious and non precious; even diamonds.

“What’s the problem?”

It is the same as yesterday.

“The love affairs...”

Yes. And he will be back for me soon.

“Could you be happy...”

Yes, you know I love him so much. I danced in front of him.

“You are must be mad.”

Yes, I am. I thought we could be married.

“Next time he would sell you for a gold coin.”

We sorted out the medals. Some were very, very old. Some were new. Some were uniquely precious and of great value. In a while, he got something inside his fist and told me.

“Close your eyes. Give me your hands.”

Nah, you will play up on me.

“I’m serious now. I have something for you to drive evil spirits away.” He teased me.

You and your fart! I laughed out loud. My sad laughter filled the quiet room.

“I said open your hands!”

Okay, Sir, here it is.

I closed my eyes and slowly he dropped the object in my hand. “Magic, here!” My palms were excited and cold, just like when one student told me to open my hands across snowy Japan, then surprised me with a Sakura. She told me, she liked me a lot, offering me the national flower of her country. And now, was another guessing moment.

Is it another precious gem?

“Hold it carefully and see for yourself.”

That time was special. I could see his face full of compassion for someone weary. I felt it was an act of consolation to blow zeal to my broken spirit. It was as though a magic clock made me a princess or sent me somewhere in another time like, Alice in Wonderland. What I held in my hands was dear to my heart, and the feeling was all of a child so loved dearly: free and happy. It was a gold heart locket; an old one, embed with red tiny rubies. Inside was a picture of the Madonna. He knew I liked the Madonna. My throat tightened and my eyes blurred with clouds of water. And then, his hands came gentle on my cheeks. He smiled and hugged me, tight.

I was certain I would get a chain for this. My ringing phone intruded. He told me, “Go now.”

“Why do you want me to leave? Am I disturbing your holy hours?”

“No, you need to go and find what will make you happy. And that boyfriend? Stay away from him. Do you think he’ll marry you for real? He has got a wife.”

Before I left his house, he’d always tell me the same reminders. That was what I evaded. I couldn’t let any one, not even my family or closest friends mock my boyfriend. It was time to leave again.

“Thank you for the Madonna.”

I hurriedly kissed him and went out of the house. I didn’t look into my phone to check, nor answer it. My boy friend was always exciting, as there might be something confidential – not business, not updates, but the tweets and yearnings of him.

Outside, when the gate was closed, I dialled his number. He was the one who called. Was he meeting me? I waited. He wasn’t answering the phone. I tried calling him again, but still, there was no answer. I texted, “Plz answr ur phne nw. I miss you so much.” As I walked the empty street, the air glistened to me. I was reminded, of my separation with him, my incompleteness, and that I was only, waiting for crumbs.

As I looked the next post, I saw that same white guy, walking and holding something that was mine. Was it my scarf?



“Yes,” I said, gesturing pointlessly down the street as I crossed to her. “I… you left it at the park.”

“Thank you,” she said, reaching out a hand to take it. She brushed a loose strand of hair back and squinted at me. “I have no money, sorry. But thank you.”

“No, you don’t… I didn’t want a reward. Are you alright? You look upset.”

She turned away, and I wondered how I could be so direct to this perfect stranger.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m inquisitive.”

“OK,Yankee Steve. I have to go now,” she said, and started to walk.A stupid, mad chuckle escaped my mouth and I caught it quickly in my hand as I chased after her.

“No, not… it means I’m nosy. I’m curious, sorry. Like a cat, you know.”

She stopped and squinted at me again, as though wondering whether to smile at this insane white man or not. Then she pointed at my nose. “Curiosity kills the cats.”

“Yes it does,” I said, nodding. “Do you want a coffee?”

She turned and started walking again. “If I had money I would give it to you, but thank you for bringing my scarf.”

I chased after her. “No! No, it’s nothing to do with… I want nothing from you. I just thought you looked like you could use a coffee.”

Her squinting tortured me. I had no clue what was going on behind those stern brown eyes, and not knowing this little thing was vanishing all that I did know; every instinct was fading from me.

“I’m a journalist, I’m not…” I said helplessly, and shrugged. Not what?

She shrugged back.



“Your boyfriend’s house?” I asked as we sat at a table beneath a red canvas umbrella.

“Why do you think that?”

“The locket.” I pointed at the little golden heart turning restlessly between her thumb and forefinger. She snapped it into her palm defiantly.

“The scarf is from my boyfriend,” she said, pulling it from her neck and resting it on the table as our coffees arrived.

I tore open a sugar packet and tapped it into my cup. “I’ll bet you chose it. It matches your dress.”

She checked her phone and did not answer me. I was right.

“You drink too much coffee,” she said at last, after she had sighed and tucked her phone away again. “Caffeine is bad for the heart.”

I shrugged again. “Everything is bad for the heart these days.”

We sipped from our cups and ventured into the silence that filled the air around us. Empty, silent air; it choked me more than smoke. Was that why my fingers reached for last cigarette after last cigarette after last cigarette?

“May I see?” I said, and held out my palm.

She stared at me through steam rising from her coffee, a cradle of warmth between her two soft hands; then lowered the cup, unfolding her fingers to proffer the locket.

It was of the yellow gold I had never admired, adorned with rubies that might have been real, or might have not; and not knowing made them seem worthless. A tiny clasp unhinged its two halves, splitting the fragile little heart in two, revealing a miniature biscuit-tin print of the veiled Madonna.

“Lucky charm?” I asked.

“She is pure. Perfect. Everything else is dirty in the morning.”

“Nothing’s quite as pretty as Mary in the morning,” I sang in my best Elvis voice, but she did not smile. A digital chirrup sounded beneath the table, and she withdrew her phone swiftly, reading the message with that same familiar squint.

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

She reached out and took the locket back, standing as she did so.

“I have to go. Now.”

Her voice had a tiny tinge of urgency to it. I stood too.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she said as she started to walk away.

I was about to remind her that I hadn’t actually offered to pay for her drink, but changed my mind and dropped a handful of coins on the table instead, following her.

“Your scarf,” I said, offering it to her. She snatched it from me with a little noise of annoyance – at herself or at me I was not sure. “It’s Michael, by the way.”

“Violeta,” she said.

She began to murmur underneath her breath as she quickened her pace. I was almost jogging just to keep up with her, my hands in my pockets as though we were just two friends in a mutual hurry. She was praying, I realised; every other word of the rosary filtered from her lips through the noise of the traffic – into which she suddenly stepped, waving her hand at a Corolla with barely readable taxicab printing that skidded to a halt beside her.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

She glanced at me like an impatient schoolteacher as she grabbed at the door.

“Hospital,” she said.



“Then Michael hop in! Or would you leave now?” So we boarded the Corolla.

I didn’t know what this guy wanted from me, but I didn’t care less because my thoughts were horrible. I knew something would happen, and whatever fate again would present to me – as to my friend Hannibal’s wisdom was to be happy and free. I assured myself that what could happen to my boyfriend was reality, like the shifting of clouds – we just couldn’t stop their movements, only God can. The next thing I felt our hands were tightly locked, and Michael’s gaze trying to seize my brokenness.

“Is there something I can do?” he asked.

“Nothing. Thank you.”

Lane upon lane, track upon track; my mind whizzed the clouds, the nothingness, the coldness of my fright, the fallen hopes, the waiting, my single life of faith. At this time, the locket...

“Don’t worry. We’ll get there.” Michael asserted.

And then, in my bag the phone buzzed again. I grasped the phone firmly, but my hands were weak so the phone dropped down the cab floor. Michael got it and read the message.

I did not mind his resolve. The driver was silent with only the twist of his wheels. The air was cold and my heart pounded heavily like rocks on my chest breaking for mercy. “Oh, Maria!”

Silence in the cab, in the air, near the afternoon... Michael didn’t say any word, but searched the locket for me and put them in my hands. He held me close and I did not resist the comfort of his arms around my bereft shoulders that needed warmth and flesh.

“We’d go to the back office of the hospital, Violeta. The staff will give us instructions...”

I paid the driver as she sprang from the taxi.

My only thought during the ride was that I could not remember the last time I had hugged someone out of the simple instinct to comfort; when had the act of touch become so foreign?

Please hurry.

That’s all the second text had said.So whatever disaster had befallen him had not restricted his use of a phone. I hated myself for the unkind thought. Had my ex looked as Violeta looked, whenever I had told her I was ill?

The nurse at the back office desk glanced at the clipboard hanging by her side. Emergency. Bay 212. Violeta hurried ahead and I followed, helplessly, at a distance. I thrust my hands into my pockets and peered through the gridded windows on the doors as we walked the length of the corridor, my lungs filling with the smell of disinfectant. The figures in the beds looked so small and vulnerable. As Violeta stopped ahead of me I realised they were children. The realisation shook in me, and my fingers closed around something in my pocket. The familiar scratch of a paper curl on skin. A forgotten cigarette.

I stood behind her. Through the window in front of us I saw a dimly lit room. A woman leaned forward in a chair, her back to us. Her hands were clasped around the hand of a boy who lay motionless in the hospital bed. From where I stood I could see his eyes were not quite closed, fine red lines crossing his face around them. Machines surrounded him, their cables disappearing under his sheet, electric green and blue lights winking and flickering softly.

Across the bed from the woman stood her husband. I recognised him. I had seen his face in newspapers; a politician, maybe. He was short, dressed in a dark business suit. His hands were deep in his pockets and he stood, slumped, staring at the boy with a strange look on his face. It was the look of a man for whom the curtain of life had been pulled aside, and he saw nothing behind it.

His glassy eyes drifted from the boy across the room to the door. He saw Violeta. He saw me. I glanced at Violeta, her eyes now welling. Across the space, through the glass, the two of them were sharing a look filled with all the sadness, the sweetness, the tenderness and heartache that I had ever known love to be about. It was then I felt alone, as the lonely will do, rain soaked neighbour to the world of the loved. A world for those who felt the warmth of others even when parted, and who felt another’s pain.

I felt pain. I felt Violeta’s, as she felt her lover’s, as she felt and he felt the pain of his son, and the mother did too, and I; all of us there in the chapel of pain, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Hospital.

He looked to his wife, and Violeta turned from the window, her hands to her mouth, eyes searching for some solace in mine. I curled an arm around her shoulder and walked her to the stairwell at the end of the ward. As we rose, step by step, I heard the rooftop doorway humming a mellow chant between the cold conditioned inside air and the free and humid day outside.

On the roof we stood and stared, listening together as the yellow scarf fluttered in morning eddies, and I saw… I saw, across the avenue, beyond the cries and howls and mirth of the city streets, through a border of bricks and bolts and steel, perched on a plinth in the centre of a pond, the concrete Madonna.

Perhaps love was not pure, but stained. Perhaps love was not harmony, but discord. Perhaps love came in all the shades of earth and grime, and in the moist and dirty breath of the taglamig air that brushed our faces on mornings such as this.

Violeta prayed in silence beside me, and I lit my last cigarette.

My last ever, I promised myself, as I had done the day before.


First published on Conversations Across Borders website
for the CAB Project (2012/june) :  Air

/iwrotefiction@blogspot.com.rosevoc2

December 5. Salamin

Salamin

Mahilig magsalamin si Thea. Pagising sa umaga salamin kaagad ang hanap. Kapag siya nagbibihis at nag-mamake-up ay walang maka-agaw sa kanya sa salamin. Kulang na lang ikwintas niya ang salamin.

“Thea bilisan mo na, hinihintay ka ng school bus!”

“Oo Ate, nandiyan na, tinatapon ko lang ang mga basyo sa kusina.”

Si Thea ay malambing at maasikaso sa bahay. Malinis din siya. Ngunit kahit anong linis ang gawin niya hindi kayang baguhin ng kahit ano ang kanyang sarat na ilong at pangit na hugis ng mukha. Sa salaming iyon, na lagi niyang dala wari’y gumaganda siya. Marami siyang nilalagay sa mukha. Sa salaming iyong, lagi niyang dala wari ay gumaganda siya. Makapal na foundation at mahilig siyang magguhit ng luntian sa mabilog niyang mata.

Sa Padre Pio Elementary School.

“Thea, wow maganda sana ang mga mata mo, kaya lang pango ka at…”

“At … at ano Rolly?”

“At pangit korte ng face ….heheheh…joke lang…”

Hindi nakapag-salita si Thea. Kumulimlim ang mukha. Umirap na lamang at umarte ng lakad.

Isang gabi, sa isang sulok sa may hadin nila.

Nagsalamin si Thea.

“Sana maganda ako. Kung hindi sarat ang ilong ko at dahil sa kwadrado kong mukha – hindi nila ako pagtatawanan. Alam ko namang pangit ako, pero may tao bang likas na pangit? Salamin, salamin – gawin mo akong mukhang prisesa!”

Bahagyang nanaginip si Thea ng gising.

Tumingin siya sa salamin at dahan-dahang nag-iiba ang hitsura niya sa salamin. Parang gumaganda.

“Sino ka? Sino ka?”

“Ikaw, sino ka? Tanong ng salamin.

“Ako si Thea!”

Maganda si Thea sa salamin. Matangos ang ilong. Mala-diyosa ang hubog ng mukha.

Mala-prinsesa.

“Ako si Thea sa kabilang ibayo ng daigdig. Maganda ka Thea dahil ikaw ako kahapon.

Ang iyong anyo na pinag-tatawanan ng lahat ay balat lamang ng buhay. Ang totoo mong anyo ay ako, ang kagandahang busilak.”

“Totoo? Kung gayon ayoko nang mag-iba pa. Masaya pala ako ng ganito dahil – hindi ko kailangan ng nose lift.”

“Hindi na nga Thea. Dahil ikaw ay isang Theang may magandang pananaw sa buhay.”

“Theaaaaaaa !!!!” Sigaw ng ate niya. “Kakain na tayo!”

Napabalikwas si Thea sa pagka-kaupo at nabitawan ang salamin. Nabasag ang salaming laging hawak niya. Ito ay nagging pira-pirasong butil ng bubog.

Pinulot niya itong dahan dahan. Nasaugatan ang isa niyang daliri. Ngunit ngumiti pa rin siya at ipinag-walang bahala. Ikinuskos sa lupa ang dugo at itinapon sa basura ang mga bubog.

“Salamat salamin, maraming salamat. Alam ko ako ay maganda. Magandang maganda!”

August 18, 2006
Rose Flores – martinez
Copyright Rosalinda Flores – Martinez, 2009
http://iwrotefiction.blogspot.com