Sometimes, Something New

appears.

Review: “The Blind Owl” by Sadeq Hedayat

To get in the Halloween spirit this year I have been on a quest for the creepiest of media.  I have watched spooky movies, listened to spooky music, investigated spooky supernatural phenomena, and, of course, read spooky literature.

I had felt disheartened at the results of my search for spooky lit.  My search began with Stephen King’s It which I lost interest in shortly after reaching the 16% marker on my kindle edition.  I then decided to try The Haunted House by Charles Dickens.  It turns out that while Dickens did love a good ghost story, this title contains few restless spirits causing fright.  The house is haunted only by Victorian ruminations on injustice, anxiety, and regret.  Great writing, but not the flavor I was searching for.  I was coming to believe that my search for spooky stories was in vain, that I had grown immune to the thrills of literature.  It was an echo of a general and recurring fear of not being capable of the type of attention required to allow the “slow media” of text to evoke powerful emotions in me.  Prior to today’s selection of The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, I worried I was not a good enough reader to be creeped out by literature.

The Blind Owl has been sitting on my shelf, idle, for some time.  I picked it up as a a companion to the publication of The Haunted House in the “Oneworld Classics” series.  I’m a sucker for a well designed series, and the covers on these affordable paper backs are sleek and smart.  It was in placing The Haunted House back on the shelf that I remembered the promises of The Blind Owl‘s synopsis.  Words like “nightmarish”, “hallucinations”, “macabre”, “terrifying” echoed in my mind, reminding me of why I hesitated to read the book immediately after buying it this summer.  This was no beach read!

Hedayat’s story, while not a good ol’ fashioned Halloween scare, does an excellent job of propelling the reader into a deranged and nightmarish fantasy.  Hedayat writes a window into a madman’s mind.  Recurring imagery and a repetition of clauses invokes the dizziness of a fever dream.  Both the real and surreal are manifested by Hedayat’s imagination with equally warped clarity.  Best of all, just as in our own most vivid nightmares, we are so swept away by what is happening that we forget to ask ourselves, “is this just a dream?”

The book reminds me of a genre I had neglected in my search for the spooky, what Homa Katouzian names “psycho-fiction.”  Katouzian coined the term to describe this branch of Hedayat’s writing, defining the term as reflecting “the essentially subjective nature of the stories, which brings together the psychological, the ontological and the metaphysical in an indivisible whole.”  It is a genre touched by the work of Franz Kafka, and brings forward similar feelings of terror as does “The Metamorphosis.”  You can almost sense Kafka’s hand on Hedayat’s shoulder.

Sadeq Hedayat was born in Iran and educated in Europe.  His literary career spanned the first half of the twentieth century, ending with his suicide in 1951.  Today, Hedayat is considered to be the greatest modern Iranian writer, but in his time he was misunderstood, criticized, and alienated by society because of his politics and his work.  During his short career, Iran was shaken by a series of political upheavals, the last before his death being the Azerbaijan revolt of 1946.  As an open and severe critic of established Iranian politics and cultural traditions, he faced strong opposition in his homeland.  The intellectual community of Tehran, weeded of such opposing views through years of political turmoil, described him as a “petty bourgeois demoralizer” and his work as “black literature.”  He was an artist without a home, feeling comfortable in neither Tehran or abroad.  This “universal alienation,” as Katouzian explains, is credited with amplifying his depression and eventually  causing his suicide.

Yasamine C. Coulter, in her essay, “A Comparative Post-Colonial Approach to Hedayat’s The Blind Owl,” believes that these aspects of Hedayat’s life are fully apparent in the main character’s suicidal spiral into madness.  She sees the narrators mental anguish as arising from his inability to adequately reconcile the conflicting ideologies of Europe and Iran, of West and East, of modernity and tradition.  The character often finds himself in a strange land, filled with strange buildings, chasing evaporating figures from memory and imagination.  The horror of Hedayat’s  The Blind Owl is in this sense the horror of losing one’s soul in the loss of one’s identity, the “soul” evaporating with the “self.”  The horror of reaching into the void and being unable to find a reality upon which to hold.  This is the spiraling madness that Hedayat so accurately felt and so accurately writes.

I suppose it is fitting in a way, that when I seek to find something frightening this Halloween I find it in the relationship between Western identity and Iran.  Fitting because of the sanctions currently being used to prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation.  Sanctions I fear will not be enough to stop an Iranian government determined to become a threatening world power.  The threat of an Israeli attack supported by the United states looms large on the horizon.

I fear these things more than some possibly because I am Iranian-American.  My father was born in Iran.  My mother was born in America.  Both are truly in my blood.  This Halloween there are few things I fear more than the prospect of a war that could harm the family members there I have yet to meet.  People who would welcome me into their homes as kin, with open arms and tears of joy.  A tribe of people who share my blood and who, if war begins, will be put into terrible peril.  Who are, even now, suffering because of the decisions of their government.

I suppose Halloween is the occasion we use to face our fears.  It is a chance to form them in effigy and dance through them.  But how can you dress up as the fear that the country you love as home will destroy the home you have yet to love?  How do you dress up as the fear that tomorrow you will read about your country killing your family?  I guess reading can scare me after all.

————————

An excerpt from “The Blind Owl”  by Sadeq Hedayat

“Just then the voices of a band of drunken policemen rose loud from the street.  As they marched by they were joking obscenely among themselves.  Then they began to sing in chorus:

Come, let us go and drink wine;

Let us drink wine of the Kingdom of Rey.

If we do not drink now, when should we drink?

In terror I shrank back from the window.  Their voices resounded strangely through the night air, gradually growing fainter and fainter.  No, they were not coming for me, they did not know…Silence and darkness settled down upon the world again.  I did not light my oil lamp.  It was more pleasant to sit in the dark, that dense liquid which permeates everything and every place.  I had grown accustomed to the dark.  It was in the dark that my lost thoughts, my forgotten fears, the frightful, unbelievable ideas that had been lurking in some unknown recess of my brain, used to return to life, to move about and to grimace at me.  In the corners of my room, behind the curtains, beside the door, were hosts of these ideas, of these formless, menacing figures.

There, beside the curtain, sat one fearful shape.  It never stirred, it was neither gloomy nor cheerful.  Every time I came back to my room it gazed steadily into my eyes.  Its face was familiar to me.  It seemed to me that I had seen that face at some time in my childhood.  Yes, it was on the thirteenth day of Nouruz.  I was playing hide-and-seek with some other children on the bank of the river Suran when I caught sight of that same face amid a crowd of other, ordinary faces set on top of funny, reassuring little bodies.  It reminded me of the butcher opposite the window of my room.  I felt that this shape had its place in my life and that I had seen it often before.  Perhaps this shadow had been born along with me and moved within the restricted circuit of my existence…

As soon as I stood up to light the lamp the shape faded and disappeared.  I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my face.  The reflection that I saw was unfamiliar to me.  It was a weird frightening image.  My reflection had become stronger than my real self and I had become like an image in a mirror.  I felt that I could not remain alone in the same room with my reflection.  I was afraid that if I tried to run away he would come after me.  We were like two cats face to face, preparing to do battle.  But I knew that I could create my own complete darkness with the hollow of my palm and I raised my hand and covered my eyes.  The sensation of horror as usual aroused in me a feeling of exquisite, intoxicating pleasure which made my head swim and my knees give way and filled me with nausea.  Suddenly I realized that I was still standing.  The circumstances struck me as odd, even inexplicable.  How could it have come about that I was standing on my feet?  It seemed to me that if I were to move one of my feet I should lose my balance.  A kind of vertigo took possession of me.  The earth and everything upon it had receded infinitely far from me.  I wished vaguely for an earthquake or a thunderbolt from the sky which would make it possible for me to be born again in a world of light and peace.”

Riding the Shoreline East

I am flying backwards in a seated position.  I’m moving around forty, maybe forty five miles per hour.

The man across the aisle wears a puffy blue vest.  He is large.  Not fat, just frighteningly large.  Tall and broad and heavy in a way that reminds me of days on the freshmen football team, watching varsity practice.  He has his arm wrapped around a woman who got on to meet him a few stops down the line.  His hand massages her side underneath her shirt.  I try not to look or get caught looking.

The  window is a dark abstraction.  Behind my reflection hovering lights make rumor of tall buildings and far away streets before they are interrupted by the sudden silver streak of another train going the opposite direction, speeding past in double time.

An hour ago we floated above the grass stubbled flood plain.  Estuary rivers lay between the clusters of pumpkin colored trees as they soaked in the warmth of the sideways Sun.  The dying light passed through the boughs to fall on the white clapboard sidings, the square Puritan windows, and the black shingle roofs.  On silent porches grimacing pumpkins sat, heads awaiting the flickering candlelight beneath straw stuffed witches.  In silence they awaited the slow filling of the moon and the joyful dance macabre of the Halloween spirits; those sugar seeking goblins of the twilight hour.

I soaked in the last visions of the quiet land.  A place uninterrupted.  A place where the trees are taller than the buildings.  A place to kneel before the altar of Nature, and succumb to her seasonal finery.

The Strange and Wondrous World of Craigslist

For those of you who have spent any amount of quality time poking around Craigslist what I’m about to relate will be no surprise.
I’ve recently begun a hunt for gainful employment.  In an ideal world this would be something part-time, with flexible hours, that paid well, and didn’t require me to do anything blatantly unethical.  I’ve learned that the world is less than ideal.

A trusted advisor told me that only the foolish job hunt on Craigslist,  but something about its rugged design draws me in.  I enjoy meandering through the hyperlink jungle of this internet classified, warily avoiding the snarling jaws of the scam-artists and con-men.  Their colors are usually quite obvious (promises of easy work for large sums of money without the need to get up from the couch or remove your Snuggie), and those inclined to skepticism, such as myself, usually have no trouble spotting them.  But, occasionally one scammer does evolve a sort of legitimacy camouflage.

The Professional’s Snuggie.  Now available in Cookie Monster.

I sent my resume to one such posting, listed as a “Part Time Administrative Receptionist.”  Turns out that’s a euphemism for, “drug dealer.”  I received a reply email tonight from a man who couldn’t decide on whether his email address should match his name or not.  Mark Kohl, writing from “mgbillin@gmail.com”, wished me to send him my personal details information at his personal email address “john_jose1@aol.com”.  My mother always taught me to never talk to strangers, and to never trust a man who can’t decide between gmail and aol.  If this weren’t suspicious enough, please observe the following:

“Dear Applicant,

 I’m looking for someone that can be prudent and reliable to work very well with good understanding as my Personal Assistant/Receptionist.This position is home-based and flexible,working with me is basically about instructions and following them,so this person has to be very close to a computer as there could be some urgent errand that is needed to be passed across. My only fear is that i may come at you impromptu sometimes,so i need someone who can be able to meet up with my irregular timings.As my Personal Assistant/Receptionist,your activities amongst other things will include;

 

Primary Responsibilities:

* Creating orders/pick slips/invoices/credit memos.

* Processing return authorizations for me as needed.

* Running personal errands.

 

* supervisions and monitoring.

 

* Scheduling programes, flights and keeping me up to date with them.

* Acting as an alternative telephone correspondence while I’m away and when needed as i am hard on hearing that is why computer works for me. Making regular contacts and drop-offs on my behalf. Handling and monitoring some of my financial activities as the case maybe.

Basic wage is $400 Weekly

I’m sure you’ll understand I tend to have a very busy schedule at this point. Please note that this position is not office based for now because of my frequent travels and tight schedules, it’s a part-time work from home for now and the flexibility means that there will be busier weeks than others. I have reviewed with your Resume and I think I am impressed with it and would like to give you an immediate trial, so if you are interested kindly get back to me. As I have been checking my files and schedules and would need someone urgently to run some errands for me this week/next week, while I am away. I will have some funds sent to you to complete the errands and would get back to you with more information on that, get back to me with your Personal/Contact Details such as:“

Wouldn’t it have been simpler to just say,  “I have the drugs.  You will sell the drugs.”?

In my wanderings I have come across the legitimate, the illegitimate, and the absurd.  For instance, did you know that there is in fact a job currently available which requires a light amount of wrestling with oiled up muscular women?  Oh yes, I kid you not.  Evidence.  Nearly applied for that one, but I don’t like to wear contacts regularly and wrestling with glasses could be a problem.  Anyway, who knows what the benefits package would look like.
Things this strange are not good for me.  They are far too entertaining!  Did you know Babecitybabes.com is looking for an editor/contributor?   Despite how it sounds, they aren’t porn.  Well, not that kind of porn, anyway.  They are a group of women, at least I assume they’re women, who are out to objectify as many men as possible.  Gorgeous!  I actually did apply for this job, but unfortunately haven’t heard back.  Too bad, I think I’d be an excellent addition to the team.  While I don’t consider myself a “babe” per se, I think I have a pretty good “babe-dar” (radar for babes) and could pick one out of the horde.  Their loss, I suppose.

While hunting for that great job on Craigslist may not be as productive as I would have hoped, at least its entertaining.  Tomorrow, I have an actual real life interview scheduled with someone from “the list”.  Keep your fingers crossed I’m not asked to do anything illegal.

Yours truly, dear reader.

Can the Internet Save Democracy?

Amber Lyon on Censorship
The failures of the modern journalism community to tell us what we need to know is not a new problem.  It is something that has been well documented for years.  In my estimation, the last truly effective investigative journalism produced in America was Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of Watergate. (If you can correct my ignorance please do so in the comments below) The story presented above, if true, reiterates an old theme of wealthy interested parties censoring the distribution of a version of a version of truth that does not suit their interests.

 
An effective democracy requires an educated public, a public with access to multiple versions of the stories surrounding their decisions.

 
So, my wonder tonight is this, is the internet the saving grace of democracy?  Does the internet provide an opportunity to seek out the multiple viewpoints necessary to form an “informed” opinion?

 
For instance, I’ve been doing some research into continuing my education.  The most valuable tool I have found so far for understanding my options, their pros, and their cons has been online forums.  A forum is a textual conversation.  It is a way for a group of people to communicate through queries, entries, and references.  These create a sort of trusted community, and the more civil participants who are engaged, the more likely a reader of the forum is to develop a healthy understanding of the topic being discussed.  Best of all, even completely uncensored and unmonitored forums have a built in fact-check through the participation of interested and diverse contributors.  If someone presents an opinion that another person finds disagreeable, they may feel compelled to explain why they find it false.  The ability for me, the reader, to see both opinions allows me to form a more rich one for myself.  I can see the threads of the tapestry of opinions, and follow them to form my own.  I can hear the voices from the middle, as opposed to simply those at either extreme.

 

 

But, lets not forget that history has a habit of repeating itself.  While the internet does pose some problems for industries that sell information (music producers, Hollywood, news media), we should remember that it also offers an invaluable opportunity for an informed public.  We should watch carefully for signs of deep-pocketed interests attempting to manipulate or censor the content of the internet, as this is what has led to the disintegration of the watchdog function of journalism.  Personally, I don’t see the music industry suffering greatly since the advent of Napster, except possibly for the closing of thousands of record stores.  The movement to freely distribute information seems like a good thing for democracy, as long as the public is capable of some form of media critique.  This last clause a lesson learned from the effect of a silly hate mongering video of the Prophet Muhammad.

 

 

So, in summary, the internet is great (despite the cats, pirates, and porn).  Let’s do our best to keep it that way.

Axiom #1

If time is flowing, let me be the funnel.

 

 

Fantasy, Part 3

Dear reader…

Stacy questions her sanity after stepping through the mysterious door and encountering an over-sized talking mountain lion.  What does this loquacious leopard desire?  Will Stacy fall prey to this prolix predator?  Read on to find out!

Relive the adventure with parts 1 and 2

—————-

“Oh God. Oh God. Oh God,” Stacy said.  She tried to think, tried to move, tried to do anything.

It was at this moment that something truly strange happened, a small moment from a largely forgotten elementary school education came rushing back to Stacy.  A man, wearing a khaki vest covered in colorful patches stood before the class.  “If you ever see a mountain lion, kids, whatever you do, don’t run, OK?” he had said.  “All you should do is try to look real big and stand your ground.  If you run, that cougar is going to think you’re a nice tasty deer and come after you.  So, try to look real big and real mean, and make lots of noise, OK?”

Stacy grabbed the corners of her jacket, lifting them high above her head.  She began to make a loud hooting grunt sound.  She began taking tiny steps toward the door, hoping to put the now staring cougar on the other side before it decided she was edible.

Orion watched Stacy shimmy behind the door.  He had never seen this before.  Usually they just ran, or fainted, or went back through the door and locked it.

Stacy, now completely hidden, put her arms down.  It couldn’t be real.  She had lost her mind.  She was too stressed from work, too overwhelmed by the nostalgia accompanying her parents move.  Maybe she had been bitten by some sort of psychedelic fly.  Those existed, sure.  Talking mountain lions did not.  Yes.  She was hallucinating.  But was there really a large cat on the other side of this door?  One she imagined to introduce himself as Orion the mountain lion?

“You aren’t real!” she screamed with her back against the door, her eyes shut tight.

“Oh, really?” Orion said, returning to his grooming.

“Yes,” she said, “You’re a hallucination.  A figment of my imagination.  You don’t exist!”

“And how do you know you aren’t a figment of my imagination,” Orion replied.

“Because,” she paused, “I’m real.  Women are real.  Talking mountain lions aren’t.”

Without making a sound Orion stood and walked around the door.  Standing he was comparable in size to a small horse.  He put his head around the door frame to look at Stacy.

“Are you sure I’m not real?” he asked.

Stacy jumped again, this time forgetting all education and scurrying around to the other side of the door.  When she found the rest of the big cat here, his back hips at shoulder level, the wild and powerful smell of his fur filled her with hopelessness.  There would be no escape.  She could only curl herself into a tight ball and pray that he choked trying to swallow her.

The audience of Treefolk, having collected on their bets, continued to watch Stacy.

Orion slid completely around the door and lay down before Stacy.  He knew the Treefolk were watching, had heard them chattering before she had come through the door.  Their silence now meant he had their full attention, which meant it wouldn’t be long before The King heard of her arrival.  Treefolk were gossips.  As soon as they collected on their bets word would spread from tree to tree, soon falling into the ears of Corvus, the King’s spy.  If the girl was to have a chance, he would need to get her out of the clearing.

Stacy, her body curled tight, her eyelids shut, had begun to talk to herself.  “Eaten by an existential cougar.” She repeated again and again in a low whisper.

“Eaten?” Orion said.  “My dear, I am a vegan.”

Stacy froze.  “What?” she said.

“I’m a vegan,” Orion said.

Stacy uncurled enough to look at the cat.  His golden eyes were soft, his ears up and relaxed.  As she looked at his paws, the size of tennis rackets she realized that if he wanted to eat her, she could do nothing about it.  She sat up, leaning into the door frame.

“Orion, the vegan talking mountain lion?”  she asked.

“None other,” he said.

And with a slow nod of her head, Stacy closed her eyes and fainted.

to be continued, dear reader.

Fantasy, Part 2

dear reader, please enjoy the continuation of this experiment in fantasy, as continued from the now revised “Fantasy, Part 1”

_____

As Stacy approached the strange door in the clearing, she couldn’t hear the small riotous whispers coming from the trees.  All she heard was the rustling of the tall grass. She didn’t hear the brief gasps of shock once they had realized that a human had not only entered the clearing, but could see the door.  She didn’t hear the small wagers or the small tinkling of small coins passing between small hands.  She didn’t hear the small grumblings of disapproval or the small shouts of encouragement.  Stacy could hear only the grass in the breeze.

She expected to find some sense to it as she got closer, something to make this strange sight more imaginable.  She searched for signs of an abandoned foundation, a concrete slab where a house used to sit, but there was none.  She searched the door frame for signs of weathered age, chipped paint or rusted hinges, but found none.  The door looked completely new.  The word ‘perfect’ floated through her mind, along with so many others that it was lost almost immediately.  ‘It must be art,’ she thought, for that is what she was taught to think of things inexplicable.  But her search for a plaque designating the artist’s name, or the year of its making, or its title, was in vain.

By now, they were all watching Stacy.  A hush had fallen over them, a restless silence.  A child’s voice spoke out, “Did she open it?”

“Not yet.  Not yet.” a voice responded.

Stacy had made a full circle around the door.  She stood before it, her curiosity growing into anger.  The door seemed to mock her with its silence, with its mystery.  She put her hands against her waist, waiting for something, waiting for the door to reveal its meaning, waiting for some part of this to make sense.  There was nothing left to do but open it.

Stacy reached forward, her arm growing large in the reflection of the polished golden knob.  She moved slowly, carefully, as though it might lash out against her like a coiled snake.  It was warm, not hot as she would have expected it to be having been under the bright summer sun all morning.  She turned the knob, and stepped forward into the slow, silent swing of the door.

She stepped through the doorway and into the clearing.  Nothing had changed.  She was still in waist high grass, still in a clearing surrounded by overgrown oak brush.  She was still under the clear blue sky.

“Oh God, Stacy,” she said laughing.  “What did you expect, Narnia?”

“Narnia is such a silly story.” a deep voice replied.

Stacy jumped at the sound of the reply.  It had come from behind her, from the grass.

“Who are you?” Stacy cried out.  “Show yourself!”

“There’s no need to yell.  I’m right here,” the voice replied.

Stacy looked down into the yellow grass and all at once she saw him.  There, laying as casual as a cat on a porch, was the largest mountain lion she had ever seen.  Its thick tail flopping from side to side as it licked its front paw.  Its head bobbing just below the height of the grass surrounding it.

“My name is Orion,” the cat purred. “And who” he paused for a lick,”are you?”

to be continued, dear reader.

Fantasy, Part 1

Stacy had followed the slow moving creek bed up into the trees.  It was the first time she had been to the park since leaving home for good so many years ago.  Her parents didn’t even live on the hill above the park anymore.  She had come back to help them move.  But as she drove down the hill something called to her from the park, from the creek, from the past.

Stacy had spent many days by the small creek as a child, picking out the finest of bright wet stones, imagining them to be precious gems.  She was always a little more than disappointed to find that the rarest and most beautiful had become nothing but dull gray rocks once she got them home.  Despite this she would pick her favorites and keep them with her, rubbing her fingers along their cool spines.  Occasionally, when she was alone and without anything to do, she would take them out to examine them, to see if the warm oils from her fingers had given them back their luster.  Sometimes they had, sometimes they hadn’t, and this became a sort of diving rod.  Was the world beautiful today, or was it hiding its beauty away?

She had found her stones again when her parents had moved.  They were in a small blue tin that once held butter cookies, hidden away with so many other small scraps of paper and baubles.  Among all the stuff in that tin, the stones brought the most back to her.  More than her old toys which were boxed and put into storage for her future children’s play.  More than the photographs of old Halloween’s with her baby brother.  These three small stones, cerulean blue, india green, and cornelian red, carried the song of her childhood.  There was nothing to do but to put them deep into her pocket.  It was where they belonged, not in this small forgotten tin.

The creek bed no longer held jewels, just stones.  Blacks and greys and sometimes off whites.  She wondered if they had all been taken by kids just like her, over the years.

As she went deeper into the narrow valley.  The plants grew in thicker, making the place feel wild and overgrown, not at all what it was.  The path, obscured as it was by the growth, seemed to lead even deeper between the hills.  ‘I’ve never come this far,’ she thought as she looked back over her shoulder.  The manicured lawn surrounding the playground was out of sight now but she could still hear the comforting hiss of the sprinkler heads as they watered the large meadow.

“I can’t be too far in, if I can still hear that.” she said to herself, allowing the sureness of her voice to give her courage.

She pushed further in.  Past the reaching fern leaves which made her worry, only briefly, about deer ticks.  Past the fallen tree now covered in moss and a thick mushroom colony that jutted out in small half circles, like hundreds of tiny saw blades stuck into the log’s side.  She could only hear the babble of the creek now, hidden as it was behind the thick clusters of blackberry bushes.

Her father used to come home with bags full of fresh blackberries.  A few scratches on his forearms and not a little purple juice staining his lips.  They would wash the berries together, but despite asking her father where he had found such sweet ones he would never tell.  “A fine berrier never reveals his favorite bushes!”  he would say.  It was just one of those things adults said that didn’t make any sense to her .  She took it as it was, allowing the meaninglessness of the words to pass, focusing instead on his grin, both assertive and mischievous.  Looking at the bushes now, bare of berries, she wondered why he had never taken her along for the picking.

Her wondering was startled away by a cracking in the brush beyond the next wall of green.  There were rumors, years ago, of mountain lions prowling these thin valleys.   There were also rumors of trolls and goblins.  It was doubtful there could still be animals that large in a wilderness so cramped.  It was more likely to be a rabbit or a raccoon, she thought, running away from her own clumsy tromping .  She thought to turn back.  No one knew she was out here, and she remembered the stories of joggers on trails not unlike this one being attacked and killed.

She pushed the thought away as simple paranoia.  She wanted to know what was at the end of this path, wanted to know where the creek came from.  It had been years since anything in this small hill town had surprised her, years since she had gone anywhere she hadn’t been a thousand times before.

As she pushed through the narrow space between the blackberry bushes and the low thick hedges on the hill it was there.  Standing full upright in the middle of a surprisingly open clearing, alone in the waist high yellow grass was a door.  It was bright yellow with a white trim and a shiny golden knob.  A door.  No larger and no smaller than the door to her own small apartment.  But bright, and new, and completely out of place.

…..to be continued, dear reader

Wednesday in the Park

Isabella both loved and hated the child.  Cooper was small and inquisitive.  Always anxious to jump out of the stroller as soon as they got to the park, as soon as he could see grass, and dogs, and other kids running through the knotted plastic playground.  He would tug upon the straps and wiggle his body like a caught fish.  It was hard to be comfortable now that he had figured out how to wriggle his way out of those straps.

 
What would The Andersons think if the straps left marks on his shoulders as he wriggled out?  It would be the end of her nannying and housekeeping career and she would be left with no choices, no options.  She would have to return to Guatemala then, return to the man who beat her and churned through her purse for cash.  Antonio would kill her if she ever had to go back, not through violence, but through alienation.  His silence the last thirty years was enough to remind her that he had all he wanted, her family’s property.  The small store and apartment complex her parents paid for with years of sweat.  First buying the store and then each room above.  Antonio could keep them.  She had her life, she had her son, and she had the memories.

 
Cooper was struggling again, had already gotten one shoulder out and they were still in the crosswalk.  She hurried her pace and shouted at him in the singsong voice she had learned to mask her anxiety and anger.  “Cooper, siéntate!” 

 

He obeyed, more from the sound of her voice than the words.  She had only started speaking to him in Spanish last week after Marcy Anderson had read that there was a statistical relationship favoring the bilingual being top of their class. She just had to have the best for her little Cooper, her little angel, her little muffin.  I guess I should be flattered, Isabella thought to herself, but she only felt demeaned.

 
First, it was the cameras.  The sudden appearance of a teddy bear on the hearth.  It was almost as if Marcy wanted her to find it, leaving her a request to dust the living room on the refrigerator white-board.  She remembered lifting up the small black bear and feeling it tug back.  The wire had been stapled in a small loop before disappearing into the hole no larger than a nail.  She couldn’t say she wouldn’t have done the same with her son, Marco, if she could.  She often wondered what he had been doing all those years when she would return home to find he had already eaten dinner, usually something from a box, and left again.  Forgetting to leave a note.  At least she would have been able to see him more if she had wired the kitchen with cameras.

 

That was when Marco really began to grow fast.  Going from that little boy always running to the door of the babysitter’s apartment when her heard her shoes in the hallway.  How many day cares had she put him in those first few years?  How many nights had she had to comb the lice out of his hair after he got it from one of the other kids?  How many nights could she hear the sadness in his long pause before answering, ¿Cómo estuvo tu día, mijo?  He became a man too quickly, learned the hard lessons too early, but it was still better than Guatemala.

 

Cooper was climbing out of the stroller now.  He knew better than to run up the sloped cobblestone path leading into the park without first getting Isabella’s permission.  He used to try that when he was two, but Isabella had convinced him that all the “big boys” knew they had to make sure they asked first.  He ran up to her side and gave her a big hug, “Isabella, can I play?  ¡Te quiero!”  He was a charmer, laying his small hands on hers as they rested on the stroller, kicking his toothy smile into the sunlight and letting his wild bangs fly.

 

“What’s the magic word?” putting her hands on her hips in mock seriousness.

 

“Pleeeeeeeease!” he grinned.

 

“Stay where I can see you,” she said, first in Spanish then in English after he cocked his head like a confused puppy and scrunched up his right cheek.  She watched the understanding slip into his brilliant little brain, and as he ran ahead to the colorful plastic jungle gym she thought of the laundry incident.

 

She couldn’t believe Marcy would do it.  Things seemed to be getting so much better before it happened.  The Andersons have given her a beautiful bonus for her part in getting Cooper into the best preschool in town.  Isabella found out there was going to be a sudden vacancy when Tandi had come sobbing after her family, The Dawes, told her they were moving to San Francisco.  Tandi had been watching the Dawes eldest daughter for five years when Mrs. Dawes got pregnant.  Tandi had loved that little girl.  The Dawes had always been so kind to Tandi, even offering to pay for her flight home to Jamaica for her Holiday bonus.  She wondered if Mrs. Dawes ever tried to pull this laundry shit.

 

The first time she found Marcy’s jogging shirts inside of Cooper’s hamper she thought it must have been some mistake.  She had made a clear agreement in her contract with The Andersons that she would only do Cooper’s laundry, not the whole family’s.  Yet there they were, spandex shirts still moist with sweat.  Disgusting!  “If you wanted something extra, just ask!” she thought to say, but didn’t.

 

Isabella knew exactly what to do the next time she found the jogging clothes in Cooper’s pile.  She took his hamper to the middle of the living room, right in front of that bastard teddy bear, and started sorting each piece.  “MINE! MINE! NOT MINE!”  She sorted the pile straight through, each “not mine” said with by a punching downward swipe.

 

At least she had never had the laundry problem again.

 

“ISABELLA!  MIRROR ME!  MIRROR ME!”  Cooper called, his face wedged between yellow playground bars.

 
“¡Mírame! You mean, ¡Mírame!” she called back.

 

 

She had been a teacher in Guatemala, on her way to becoming a principal before the Plan de Sánchez massacre scared her into leaving Antonio with Marco for the United States and never looking back.  She had grown up with the Civil War, but that was too much.  Antonio was never reason enough to leave.  But after the massacre, her dreams wouldn’t let her stay.  She was always running from the gunfire, turning around to look for a son she couldn’t see, running back and seeing the street filled with dead Marcos.

 

She shook the thought out.  It was no good to dwell on what had been.  She was here now, enjoying maybe one of the last bright and warm days the year would bring.  Being on this bench, in this sun, under these trees, listening to the laughter of children, was enough.