Bitten Walk

She shivered inside her coat, allowing the silence of Upper Street to buzz into her eardrums and cause a tingle down her spine. This night, as she looked up at the moon, pregnant as its time of month would have it, she was prepared to allow the discreetness of evil have its way with her. Intentionally, she walked down the avenues of most resistance to all kind. In her pocket was her identification, solely, so if she were subtly stabbed in the side, which she’d mercifully adjust physically to so that it would actually kill her, her body would readily be identified as that of Donka. The appropriate measures then taken of contacting her family, which, she imagined, would be similar to her parents receiving the news that horses adjust swifter than donkeys. She enjoyed this image, Donka did, of herself lying dead in some obscure lane, which anyone who knew her would wonder why she was in anyhow. This was a brave secret of hers, these death marches.
Already Donka added up the entire cost of her being at the moment of walking down the street, and unless someone wanted to donate her organs for thousands she was no worth more than a cheap university mug. So, in this, she felt like she rightfully would dupe the system that would send her to martyrdom. Donka was faithless anyway, mending any tatterings in her cloak would surely dishevel within moments of conclusion of needle and thread.
The burden that emptied and dried her of substance was precisely that which gave her color. Donka would not happily settle within herself the dispute of what was right and wrong with her being. She chose, often nights, to walk municipally around the town to survey what others found so easy. A certain contemporary morality vanished from her understanding, but she looked around her, wondering, with scrunched brow, what of this society she could relate to.

Often on these evenings posturing about the rollicking roads full of bars, translucent grins and misappropriated energies, manmade textures and colors, vivid nonorganic visuals streaming like the gutter of a nuclear waste site. She would get frustrated and turn around heading north, where the streets went one way and no one driving could get out of the neighborhood without good directions or happy accidental turns. It was this part of town that disintegrated rapidly block by block. This was where Donka saw faces so anguished from the day’s misspent labor, the dimes it added up to, how each day was gladdened purely for the survival of it, and even then the pain was questionably too astonishingly delivered. And it was here that Donka felt most assured in humanity. Still, secretly she hoped for a stab in the back, a random shot in the dark, someone to beat her and mug her, to take away the senseless despair she consistently found herself in.

Unfortunately, perhaps, she blended in too well. Though she did wear a nice coat her friend had found (“Ah, this is just your size,” she could hear Carlene declaring, proudly holding it above her like a trophy), she did not wear it correctly. She had taken off its belt, as Donka thought her midsection looked frumpy with it fastened, and singed the part that hit her right thigh, while warming it on the mammoth gas heater in her apartment. Also, and perhaps more importantly, she had the attitude of a person down deeply without luck, like her parents had just thrown her out upon finding great bulging tumors on her scalp, like her entire world had been depleted and she found herself miserably thrust in her least favorite town for an echoing eternity. She did not wear the face of aristocracy, the particular brand of person that was so easy to rip off, if you knew the proper way of reaching into a person’s pocket and the exact speed at which to do it. She even, passers by thought, could pass for a terrible whore, a woman just recently turned. Nor did Donka smell appropriately financially sound. Hers was a peculiar odor, a musk she tried masking with lemon and clove, but which impressed upon others as “cattish and smoky.” She rarely washed her hair and found great difficulty maneuvering in make-up sections, thus looking and smelling the part of a woman undone. It was hard for men to find her attractive.

Her mind, this evening, was flippant, raging with a certain destruction that only years of repression allowed for. She had found a broach on the ground in the busier quadrant of town, one with amber flecks whirled about in a hazy, abstract manner, reminding her bitingly of her dead grandmother, who wore broaches and scarves and dresses with matching jackets and make-up. She had her hair done twice a month and was religious about hosiery. Slipping into a self-effacing monologue, she sarcastically applauded her parents for naming her after the woman she was least like. This broach she found on the ground was channeling through her fingers inside a pocket, opening and closing its fastening, abruptly ending her self-defeating diatribe and wondering at the brooch’s ability as a weapon, with it’s short, sturdy pin with a fine tip. 

Kitchen Memento

I sat the warmest lamp on the checker-tiled kitchen floor, next to a pile of tapes and a broken boom box that only allowed for radio and tape deck perusal. I sat down in a chair at my small wooden prep table and began chopping several large cloves of garlic. The knife was just sharpened and I could sense the smoothness of its blade, of its endeavor to cut open the aromatic herb, fill the impending maggots –who incensed my trashcan which had weeks-old potato salad—with an air deadly unto their antennae and legs and little bodies. The Vidalia onions succeeded the garlic, surpassing in affecting the kitchen’s living members. I teared up, but breathed through open lips, exhaling gently, body beginning to bop to a Frank Valli and the Four Seasons tape.

Fourth of July still invaded my kitchen. My in-town-from-out-of-country cousin and I prepared a feast for few. The fruit from our sangria still lying bleakly in an apple juice jar. The fermentation from strong whiskey and cheap burgundy wine caused the grapes, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, lemons, oranges to sag like wilted prunes. The dill and labneh in the potato salad confused my sense of smell, fumes of putrid sourness possibly still edible. I hung onto the three plastic containers of Jon Claude’s leftovers for three weeks, never humoring the chunks by way of digestion. I had two trays of Jell-O that were only ingested with cups of the sangria, a few patrons sliding sloshes of the blue and red festive gelatin to perhaps anchor a more deep drunk. I munched on popcorn we prepared on the stovetop the entire night, feeling the elastic in my stomach shrinking as I drank repetitively, waiting for the boy who promised an arrival. I was on a consistent alcohol guzzle since 3:00 that afternoon, a nap, a rainstorm that outlasted most of those celebrating. I wanted him indelibly. What could I possibly do to relinquish his moving across the country in three weeks? My morbid side accepted his departure as part of a contemporary tragedy.

The onions and garlic were slowly simmering in unsalted butter in a saucepan over a heat so low it was nearly a suggestion of a flame on the gas burner. The tomatoes were sorted, some heirlooms, some romas. Those with deep cracks filling with a fuzzy white were tossed. The rest were diced and waiting to join the onion and garlic base. I swept the floor mechanically, observing the difference the lighting made. Overhead bulbs always disenchanted me, a romance filtered through an old brass lamp where it ought not be, on a dusty kitchen floor.

He walked in with a lazy grin, a relief at locking eyes. I sat the broom in a corner and wrapped my arms around his neck, kissing lips, tongues slinking together. His white t-shirt was practically threadbare, I could nearly see his nipples, chest hair slipping out of the ringer. His legs always looking longer in corduroy, a fortuitous, brawny man, I could get a handle on it through the touch of any of his body parts.

Banana Leaves

The rags that covered the duo’s torsos were made out of banana leaves. Before jet engines fell from puffy gray clouds on the Pacific’s sundry beachline banana trees hung heavily with saturation, ripe fruit, monkeys delivering laughter. The pair happened to be naked at the right moment, still dripping from their dip in the ocean, frivolously tying together coverage for their genitals. It was law, no nudity. Pieces of a beetle shell were still fastened to Jeanette’s just next to a mole on her thigh. Jeanette and Apollo had several comrades who were banana messengers, some close connections to the outer world, as produce messengers, specifically fruit, were sent into foreign lands to deliver their forbidden goods.

The two needed to find an alley soon, or find the city’s limits, a place to pee, maybe to find a few scraps left behind by another of their sordid, outlived, nomadic kind. They had been shucking what beans grew wildly on wire fences for ten days, wrapped in green onions that Jeanette had tied together and slung over her shoulder. The bean plants’ yellow leaves indicated the delicacy of their temperament. Apollo looked at his partner, eyes gloomy, lips parted and white from dried saliva. The gash on his forehead drove throbs that rattled his thoughts. He lost his ability to speak two days ago. Jeanette noticed his gaze and hesitated with her words.

“You cannot walk much further today. The sun is reaching its apex. We’ll rest awhile when we approach the river, maybe find some shade?” He nodded a weary approval, slowly blinking. She knew to not beg for anything. This country was not good for generosity, and one could be murdered for entertaining such notions. Every man for his own, she chanted internally. She stopped and stood in front of Apollo, handling the water canteen, dampening a worn brown handkerchief, stained with blackened blood. Applying this to her partner, wringing a stream along his neck, then gingerly dampening the back of her neck. She then tied it to Apollo’s forehead, covering his bruises and the single square-shaped gash.

They continued, leaving the town’s deserted limits. No-one approached their path for seemingly weeks. Days slipped into overdrawn epic struggles to stay on two feet, let alone walk twenty, sometimes thirty miles a day, usually barely aware of one another. Jeanette wondered if she’d begin an evolutionary descent, crawling on all fours, walking part of a bygone species. Was anyone else alive after all the rotten debris? The heat was pressing her skin, a sticky mass. The toxicity of local air wasn’t as bad here, not like it was in previous provinces. They weren’t accustomed to cleanliness.

Jeanette perked at this thought. A slacking toxicity meant the river would carry health and good fortune from mountaintops, less a suicidal bounty. Apollo would likely regain his speech and together they would have coalescing stronger dreams, the clouds of their dreams would string together and form a fortress impenetrable. Apollo tripped over a dusty rock in the path, his expression unconscious. Vultures above noted this unforgiving moment. Tucked in Apollo’s thong was a rickety slingshot. Birds in this area were particularly gruesome. Their feasts were harder to find, animals were stronger here than the aviary and did not fear winged beasts. In particular, though, these vultures were two times larger than Apollo, and their cries were getting louder. Helping Apollo to his feet, she also took the rock he stumbled over and launched it with the slingshot. One of the two birds immediately fell to the ground several yards away. Dead. Apollo, enchanted, for the first time in months smiled. The second vulture migrated south.

Unchained Melody and Other Melodrama

Upon visiting such specializations and theories as stem cell research (in China a child was cured of blindness via stem cell), atheism, outer space, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, I’ve come to wonder if I’ve been taking this world for granted. By vainly believing that maybe incarnation is real, or that ghosts exist, I allow myself to slack, because I naively think I’ll have more than one chance, that I will exist longer than my current stay on the planet. This creates purpose, the theories of afterlife, of gods and celestial entities. From what science says about the laws of nature, we each have one shot and there is no invisible man in the sky who’s dictating our actions or predetermining our future (refer now to George Carlin’s theories), it is entirely up to us to make our lives full. And unless anyone can point me in the direction of evidence to a soul, or spirit, or whatever you might call that floating part of your essence that lives after you die, I’d like to spy it, and peer with a microscope. So far, I have not seen a single slice of evidence that soul is real.

Movies like Ghost make death more complicated, when in reality it is simple and melodramatic. It’s good to cry after a person dies, because the likelihood of that person being entirely dead, never to exist again, is very good. As much as I would like to believe in some of the gibberish hocus pocus, the more I learn and read about the world, the more the arrows point towards godlessness, religionlessness. In terms of those I care about, sitting back, falling out of touch, and assuming we have eternity to meet would be tragic. And that expands to my life in general, to do what I love is more important, and there is a universal trend in this aspect. My generation is seeing major fallbacks in religion, unprecedented numbers are dropping out and claiming nothing as their religion, which is fortunate since our current war is largely in thanks to religious clashing. Not only is my generation not going to church anymore, or claiming specific beliefs, they are also looking at the world with a cocked eyebrow, uncertain of what makes it all go ’round. Previous generations have had their answers (make money, live by consumerism, support and add on to the family), whereas the question of spirituality and afterlife are now determining answers in an ethical sense.

I’m losing myself here, though. Let’s go back a bit.

In a way, I find this approach of atheism opens up entirely new ways of accepting the world, accepting science, invention, space travel, because we, as a species, are not attempting to mimic some great man in the sky because he does not exist (and if he did, think about it, why would he decide to not answer anyone’s prayers?), we are attempting to venture beyond this planet and into foreign areas of the universe. Perhaps this sounds far-off, but thirty years ago that was what science fiction meant for our current society. Our filmmakers are obsessed with the idea of communication with other life-forms and major space exploration. And I’m under the guise that if we gave into the creedence of NASA we, as a species, might survive.

I was appalled when I found out Barack Obama will cut NASA funds if he becomes president. It sounds like a fateful move on our species’ part, one that would determine the distant future, further learning and development. I found an article (http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obamas_nasa_plan_gets_little_p.php) . And I don’t mean to get political, because I like to think of myself as rather apolitical, mostly, but when it comes to my own money and where it goes, and those elected to make the big decisions for us, it seems fundamental to get up in arms if I must.

Since this is full of so many concepts, concerns and issues, I will probably later come back and pick at this or that. For now, though, I am listening to songs like “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, “O’ My Stars” by Michael Hurley, and “Fistful of Love” by Antony and the Johnstons, and think melodramatically about how to spend what little time I have in the here and now.

kitchenless?

Sadly, the podcast has not taken off as I had initially hoped it would. I have found more distractions in the outer world, work and exercise, cooking and cleaning, reading monstrous piles of literature, pretending to study for the GRE and studying landmarks and sites for my, yes, anticipated and recently decided move to Louisville, Kentucky. So long, Lexington, population flubberish, attitudes of aristocratic steel, pitted dead end bachelor’s degree with nay a scurry of water to ride this one out. So, we’re gone, just like that, it’s enough being from this sometimes wearisome and dreadful city, seeing the same old blocks repeatedly, with fewer and fewer refuges, escalating scandal, heartbreak, not a tear of mercy. There’s a drought here, and it starts internally, I’m waiting for the pulse, but if I hold my breath, this might never show me its livelihood. I must exit before I see no way to abandon it, before I forget what moving around feels like, what discovery requires, what kind of mentally challenging escapades adapt a person to his/her strange comrads and streets. I see no way around this city except outward. So, off we go.