Diane

Image by Kathy Liao

She is a creature behind bars where there were no bars. Eyes peering back and forth, navigating the parameters of the room she refused to walk. Her legs would not let her. Trapped within her body, her mind, nothing moved except pulse points and eyes, even as long strings of saliva decorated her hospital gown.

“Momma” hadn’t wanted her, hadn’t held her, hadn’t cried as she was taken away; only eighteen months old, tossed from one home to another, until finally, now, here, in a place of long corridors of jammed rooms with empty souls housed within, she resided.

In dreams, she walked down tree-lined streets back, back, back to where Momma sat staring with clenched hands. No, she mustn’t return, though she always did, to this, her happy place, her escape from beatings, rapes and bad food.

Sometimes a nurse or doctor would come to examine her seeing a spark of light flash and then diminish into her deadened eyes. She was there, screaming, inaudible, but there. Howling, “yes, see me,” as they walked away; their shoes echoing on cold tiles.

An inner voice takes over as she watches them walk away.

Run, run, run, you must find a way though there is no way to make your body oblige you. He is coming again and there is no way to fight him. He, like so many others before, will take, take, take without a thought about the pain or the shame or anything else. You cannot scream. You cannot cry.

I dare you. I dare you to try.

You cannot do anything but remain still and trapped within a cage of skin and bone.

This is how it is. This is how it is, as she remembers reaching out with her eyes to “Momma,” and she turned away from her without even giving her a name. She has one now. They were up to the “D’s” that day, and so here she is. Here she is, outside of herself again, eyes darting back and forth; revealing nothing of her turmoil or terror, until another tick of the clock and time has its way with her once again.



(This story is based on a former student of mine. She was only seven when I taught her, but had the mental and emotional age of someone much younger. She was already caught in the system, going from foster home to foster home. I loved her dearly and she knew it. She used to love to sit in my lap and notice all of my jewelry. I hold her even though she was heavy, because I knew that she hadn;. It's one of the great heartbreaks in my life, that one day when I went to work she wasn't there. She had been transferred to another foster home over the weekend. There was no way for me to find out where she was, because I was only her teacher. Just the same, she continues to be in my thoughts even now, all these years later.)

Hopscotch

She hadn’t felt like herself for quite some time after the surgery. She wasn’t in pain, that had subsided after the first few weeks, and her healing was “going along nicely,” according to her doctor. Still, there was something holding her back from normality; a sense of slowly sliding through life that countermanded her need to reclaim the time before.

“Hysterectomy” was not a word she ever thought would have been used in regard to her, and yet, there it was, written across her life with thick, black strokes. True, she felt better with the tumor gone, yet her surgeon had taken something more. No, not her womanhood; she didn’t define herself in that way, even though society had made that attempt on all young girls of her generation. Her childhood room had been littered with baby dolls and miniature versions of motherhood until the first drips of blood came signaling that true motherhood was on the horizon. Yet, it had never come, but neither had a mourning for it come. There had been no inward itch towards motherhood, even as the years flew past. She blamed the fact that she had spent her early youth tending babies and toddlers by the dozens; being elbow deep in dirty diapers, vomit, tears and hugs. Still, she wasn’t certain if that was true.

Looking out of her study window, she saw a group of young girls chalking a sidewalk and remembered doing the same herself. Those rituals of games and chants that ended with how many children you would have, as a curse for your skill at hopping across chalk lines or jumping a rope. “Little boys did not/do not play games that define them by breeding,” she murmured to herself, before loudly saying, “enough,” and stomping out into the street.

She marched past the girls and their games as echoes of niceties from well-meaning friends pulsed through her temples. Not even one tear streaked her face as she padded the pavement in determined steps. She had not been beaten down nor did she accept the role of prune or parched desert. She knew she was vital, as every woman everywhere is vital whether she is a mother, a wife or not. Yet, since the surgery, there was a sense of being sucked into that particular attitude.

“I’ll have some apple pie a la mode, please,” she responded to the waitress who had asked for her order in the restaurant she found herself in after walking past exhaustion.

“You’re gonna love it. Our pie is the best in town and you’re lucky, because the cook just made a fresh batch. Nothing better than just out of the oven apple pie a la mode, in my book,” said the waitress almost skipping across the floor.

“Lucky me,” she replied back, a smile spreading across her face. “Yes, lucky me,” and she reasons to feel lucky. The doctor had removed a fast-growing soccer ball-size tumor, which had grown through her uterus, and it hadn’t been cancerous. She would no longer feel the constancy of it growing and pushing inside or ever hemorrhage because of it again. Nor would she ever have to deal with her ex-fiancé who had already named their children and beaten down any of her attempts to grow into her own skin.

It was the first time she’d remembered him and how bad health had played a role in setting her free. Still, everything didn’t come together in that moment, but it was a start. She could feel it, even as she savored the pie and nodded her thanks to the waitress. She had looked at herself in a mirror of her own design and returned with a triumphant smile that continued as she walked home past the rain that hurried the little girls into their homes, and washed away all the hopscotch boards in the city. 

Romper Stomper

To hear me read "Romper Stomper" click the triangle on the left to begin streaming audio or click this text to download the MP3.

He stomped space with a drunken toe, suddenly tired from the taste of the melancholy found at the bottom of a bottle.

“No need to worry,” he slurred at the contents, as he swished and swirled them around, before slurping them down. Apparently, he hadn’t had his fill of the same bland taste from the same bland existence of nine-to-five followed by a six-pack in front of the TV every night. Everything he consumed had the same consistency as a cloudy day, with a sharp aftertaste that made him want to die.

He watched the news while smiling sarcastically as some soon-to-be-forgotten celebrity bragged about the things he wished he’d done. But he’d learned to accept the rectangles he’d drawn around himself, because he was smart enough to know that life wasn’t about what we choose, but what we accept.

Everything he had accepted was out of desperation. Certainly that’s how he ended up married to the grey-faced specter who sat across the room in flickering shadows hovering. Few meaningful words had ever passed between their petrified and passionless tongues. He’d called an old girlfriend in search of new flavors for his senses to savor, but their intercourse tasted like the telephone, and their conversation was perfumed in plastic-coated pleasantries.

Sex had become redundant. Even lusty kisses between strangers in strange places were no longer filled with myriad sweet sensations that pulverized him into sweet submission. Joy awaited at the bottom of the bottle amid the essence of his own decaying distress.

He looked at his wife and she glanced through him. There was nothing to say, not even “goodnight,” as he stumbled to the refrigerator for another brew.

Evolution

Temple monkeys sprawl in the sun, unaware of anything but the growling of bellies and the chirping of their broods. A quick jolt of fear by something stirring nearby dissipates as the search for carnal needs takes hold. They do not know that right now, abused kids around the world cry in corners and bleed, models starve in Paris fashion houses to fit into the latest throwaway trends, while in America, teenage girls are either lusting or loathing Edward Cullen while popping pimples and dreaming. Instead, they eat fallen fruit on forest floors in the warmth of ancient temple climbs.

From forest floors to boardrooms and windswept prairie plains, we have not grasped this elemental truth; we are not plastic. We may occasionally be slightly psychotically metallic; unfeeling things, without the ability to realize that there is something better, than what we so easily accept.

Lorena does not smile as crowds of ideas fight for supremacy in her consciousness. In a corner of the street she walks down every day, an old man hums drunkenly. She thinks of joining him, but doesn’t recognize his tune. It is not something she recognizes from the radio. She would ask him, but there is no point. She knows she will not take the time to learn. Instead, she will come up with excuses to forget him and his music. Instead, she will lose herself in the shop windows she passes, without realizing that the painted smiles of mannequins are the only smiles she’s received today.

We are sometimes reptilian, crawling on our bellies without pride or knowledge of legs, following the crowd that follows the crowd before it. Our feet might have lead us to thoughts, but we walked away too soon for them to take hold.

Temple monkeys do not care, as they stand guard over eternity. They live, breathe, birth and die on the same spot, beside the same temple that generations of their kind have occupied since its construction. That is the only crowd they follow. While we rush to go nowhere, blindly accepting half lived lives as reality or fate.

Lorena tries not to care that she hasn’t been invited to the office party. She tells herself that it was an oversight as she listens to the laughter of her coworkers echoing down the corridor. It is fine. It is good, she tells herself. She will show them all someday. She will be something more than she is now, though she has no idea what that could be. She thinks all this, while leafing through a copy of a photography magazine detailing the lives of primitives and primates, to make herself feel superior.

Godiva Undone

To hear my reading of "Godiva" go to the Readings page.

She echoed these words to herself as she lay dying in want of something more; something exciting like a ride through Coventry. “I cannot pretend to be a box of chocolates. I cannot pretend I am capable of love. Shouldn't you have awakened as well,” she asked looking at the sleeping form beside her.

"Those who dream that they are Cleopatra awaken to find black booted reality stomping upon their crystalline fancies." This would be her explanation for the shattered glass upon the floor. If only the shag carpet was able to hungrily swallow each shard of unhinged mirror like a Bedouin in search of one drop of liquid sustenance. But no, reality is not as kind as dreams.

Her old dreams hung upon her brow like beads of sweat, trickling down where they were happily caught on her tongue. She delighted in their salty-sweet-haziness as she silently cleaned up the floor.

“That is all that remains of who I was in murky hoped for memory,” she thought, remembering the poems she’d written and tossed aside like trash. “My memory and I are long lost friends. She and I may have been writing you on those thrown away scraps, so much like these shards. Would you recognize our hands in spite of the blood? In spite of what time has taken from them?”

She looked at her hands. They were no longer beautiful and smooth as they’d been when he’d wrapped her fingers in platinum and gold sealing her as his own. Even their stones had lost their enticing gleam. Her hands ached under the weight of wifely obligations.

Once her hands ached from writing. She remembered in college, how her pen hummed happily; hungry for words, these children of its unholy union with wanton paper and thought. She believed the day would come when she would write them all; delighting in each syllable and phrase. 

Words weren’t dangerous in those days before her husband told her to “hush” whenever she tried to speak. Ideas flowed freely unhindered, and safety hadn’t been their aim. Smoke wasn't the signal of her anger and repression, which she exhaled in explosive bursts.

It had finally come. It had come. The day. This day had come, and now surrender rose on the horizon beckoning her to accept that as the definition of her life. And she smiled in the knowing that this step was not the final one, but the first of many towards oblivion.

This story grew from this poem, "Godiva."

The Conversation

To hear my reading of "The Conversation" go to the Readings page.

Once upon a time, in the land of America, in a place called Brooklyn, two women attempted to have a conversation.

“What a day I had!” said Sylvia, a recent graduate of the ‘Barbizon School for Pretentious Females Over Forty,’ to her companion, Maureen, a manicurist and graduate of the “Billing’s House of Upper-Lip Bleaching.’ “First, as I was perambulating the circumference of my environs, a blitzkrieg of ebony miscreants assaulted me with a glow of amplifiers until my aural cavities, which are much accustomed to more discriminating reverberations, converted themselves into a great void of nothingness.”

“Huh?” said Maureen.

“While I wuz wawkin’ ‘round de block dis mornin’, a bunch of black kids wuz playin’ dere music so loud I couldn’t hear nuthin’!”

“Oh,” said Maureen, while chewing her gum. “Oh my gawd.”

“Yeah,” said Sylvia, “I almost regurgitated my cock-crow victuals all over de place!”

Maureen stopped mid-chew, with her mouth open wide enough to see its’ contents. “Yeah, I hoid of dat happenin’ on de news last night. Good thing dat lady called 9-1-1 or she woulda lost her house.”

Sylvia looked at Maureen, then at the ceiling, which often substituted for God, before continuing her discourse.

“Then this afternoon, because of the idiosyncrasy of my chronometer, I was unpunctual at the conveyance transference locality and was forced to ambulate to the province of my vocation.”

“Huh?” said Maureen.

“My watch wuz slow, so I missed de bus and had to walk to woik.”

“Oh! Oh my gawd. Don’t cha just hate dat?”

“Yeah,” said Sylvia, “if I don’t submerge my pinions in some thermogenic aqua pura, I’m gonna die.”

Maureen raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow, and then slowly let it fall. “Uh yeah,” she said, “didn’t Julia Roberts get an Oscar for playin’ someone who had dat? Gawd, I love her, she’s such a good actress.”

Sylvia became more intimately involved with the ceiling. This time however, it was a nice country lane where happy little bunnies hopped and played over the rotting remains of Maureen. She sighed, contented and refreshed before continuing to speak.

“So after leave-taking the province of my vocation and discerning that it was an unaccountably agreeable day, I determined to promenade to my habitation.”

Maureen swallowed her gum.

“On the way I passed by a pander of pornographers, which was beside a lech of dirty old men with protruding obscenities in their nether regions.”

She looked at Maureen, “you get what I’m sayin’ heah?”

“Uh, I think so,” said Maureen. “Oh my gawd.”

“Well dere wuz dis guy, I mean, this rogue. Well his posterior wuz seized so tightly in his raven cow-hide breeches that I virtually oozed solvent all over my lips and down my chin.”

“Oh my gawd.” said Maureen. “Is dat good?”

“Oh yeah it is!” said Sylvia, “After a quick hello, we wuz like a lubricity of nymphomaniacs, a rut of satyrs, a concatenation of orgiasts!”

“Huh?”

“We wuz doin’ it like rabbits all over de place!”

“Oh my gawd!”

“Yeah, it wuz wonderful.”

They both looked dreamily off into the distance.

“An’ I’ll tell ya somethin’,” said Sylvia almost forgetting herself, “I don’t think I’ll be able to perambulate the circumference of my environs or anyplace else for a coupla days.”

“Well,” said Maureen, “not unless you use lots of hairspray.”

Safety First

"Hey!" said Mrs. Johnston, "You could've turned!"

"Just a minute," said Mr. Johnston, his hands grasping the wheel of their Benz like his life depended on it.

Mrs. Johnston eyed the approaching traffic, waiting for her husband to make the turn out of their driveway. "There, right after that red car!"

"No, I can see another car coming after it."

"But you've got enough time, that other car is a good distance away!"

"Yes, but it's still there."

The red car passed by. "Now's your chance!"

"I can't. That other car, it's coming closer."

"But its four blocks down the road!" she said, accentuating every syllable with her arms.

"Now it's three. Then two and soon it will be right here in front of us."

She tried to frown, but Botox prevented her. So, she blinked her eyes while pounding her fists on her thighs.

"I'm just trying to be a safe driver."

"But what's unsafe about making a turn when there's a break in traffic?"

"Anything could happen."

The car in question chugged by.

"That car could've lost its brakes and come barreling right for us. We could have been in a terrible accident. We could have been killed."

"But it didn't lose its brakes!" she said, ripping her fingers through her coif and massacring every curl.

"Well, it could have."

"Are you out of your mind?" she said, decorating the windshield with missiles of spit.

"No, it's just that safety reigns supreme when I drive this automobile."

"You're making us late for our dinner with the Millers!"

"Well, we certainly wouldn't make that dinner if we were dead, now would we?"

Tears plunged down her face, turning her mascara into long black snakes racing towards her chin.

"Charles."

"Yes?"

"The street is completely empty now. There are no cars coming towards us from either direction. Turn."

"I can't."

"Why not!" she said, grabbing his arm and shaking it.

"Because sooner or later, another car will come."

"Well of course another car will come! It's not like we have the only one on the road."

"That's right, and I don't know if the drivers of any of them have been drinking or taking drugs or anything else I don't have any control of. This is the safest way. We have to stay here. We have to wait."

"Wait for what?" she said, screeching so loudly that dogs began barking.

"The right moment when it will be safe to turn,” he said calmly patting her hand. "Now I know you're worried about our evening out. You have spent half the day getting ready for it. But, I'm sure the Millers will understand us being a little late."

"A little late?" she said, her voice a menacing snarl. "Do you realize that we would be there right now, but because of this bizarre notion of yours, we're still in our driveway?"

"Well, you could always go inside and call a cab."

"I'll do no such thing! It wouldn't look right if I did that while were you here. The neighbors would think we're quarreling."

"Then wait for the bus,” he said smiling already sure of her answer.

"Not in this outfit I won't! I look too good to be on the bus. Every derelict in the world would be asking me for change. Then I'd have to walk, and these shoes aren't comfortable for anything but sitting. Besides, I refuse to arrive alone. Appearance, Charles. Appearances."

"Then sit back and relax."

"Relax?"

"Be patient. I'll know when the moment comes."

"Well, when will that be?"

"I don't know, but at least we'll be safe. Isn't that what counts in the end?”

“I’m going inside to call the Millers,” she said.

“No, I think you’ll be safer here where I can keep an eye on you,” he said locking her door with the driver’s side lock.”

“Charles!" she said frantically trying to open her door.

“You’ll be safer this way and that’s what counts.”

“But Charles, just a minute ago you told me to go inside and call a cab…”

“I changed my mind.”

“No Charles, you’ve lost it.”

“Actually Evelyn, I think I finally found it.”

“But what happens if…”

“Hush, now dear….there’s nothing to worry about…,” he said patting her hand again.

So, they sat there until the windows of the car fogged up and everything around them turned into mist, as they waited for the time to come when everything was safe enough for them to journey down the road before them.

A Good Day

Mona hadn’t bathed in two weeks, and had only reluctantly forsaken the constant comfort of her well-worn pajamas for her less assuring jeans and t-shirt. Getting dressed was a hateful necessity reserved only for buying groceries or going to funerals. Her neighbors were nosy and she wasn’t in the mood to get into another screaming match with them about her going outside half-dressed, so she’d put on her jeans to appease them.

Just the same they were stiff with body odor and stains, which Mona considered a personal thumb on the nose to anyone who cared. Besides, she didn’t have anything else to wear. Her other clothes weren’t safe anymore and had been stored outside in the garage, where the vermin could have their way with them.

Mona’s hair hung in long impossible knots so snarled that she’d broken combs in two in her attempts to fix it Now the remnants of those broken combs decorated her hair with plastic rainbow teeth.

Because of the prying eyes of her neighbors, she’d become accustomed to living in dimly lit rooms. Now her vision was restricted to what little of the world she could see through the permanently narrowed slits, which had once housed luminous, hopeful eyes.

The morning sun infested the walls with angry fingers summoning Mona to her bed. Now was the time for sleep, when the safety of darkness succumbed to all the things she sought seclusion from and the only safe place was beneath her moth-eaten blanket until darkness returned, enveloping. Though in truth, nothing could protect her from the onslaught of perniciously happy people whose aim in life seemed to be making her see how truly miserable her life was.

The phone rang. It was already beginning.

“Hello.”

“Hi there, my name’s Bob from the Mayflower Life

Insurance Company.”

“Go away Bob…”

“Ma’am, if you’ll just give me one minute…”

“Razor, I think I’ll use a razor.”

“Hello?”

“Looks like it’s gonna to be harder this time, gonna have to cut through scar tissue to do the job right.”

“Uh, I’m sure you wonder what will happen to your family in case something happened to you...”

“I’ll have to soak the skin really good to soften it before I start cutting. Ever slit your wrists, Bob? I’m an expert. I’d love to show you how it’s done properly…”

Click.

Mona smiled as she reached for the tattered notebook on her nightstand table. She put a check on the blank page.

One.

Soon this page would be full of checks just like all the other pages of all the other notebooks that towered up from the floor like dozens of wobbly columns.

She went back to sleep, but as always her rest was interrupted by someone knocking at her door. Mona opened it only enough to admit a shadow and nothing more.

“Go away.”

“Hi, my name is Crystal, and I have an offer you won’t believe...”

“Crystal, the only thing you could offer me is your head on a spike.”

Mona smiled as she watched the woman run away.

Two.

It was going to be a good day.

The Good Wife

Marla’s final descent began five years ago. That was the night Jonah told her he’d been cheating. She remembered how he said he still loved her and wanted to work it out. The other woman hadn’t meant anything to him, but had only served as a rest stop from the same grey paved road he’d traveled everyday with her.

Things would be better now. Amazingly, he’d realized that love was more getting sex whenever he wanted it, and that Marla was indeed, a good wife.

She remembered how surreal it had felt hearing his confession, along with all of his words of reclaimed love and devotion. The day had begun so differently with a more lingering good morning kiss from him than was usual and a day full of errands. Now it had turned into a soup of betrayal, begging and burnt chicken.

Jonah said he’d be waiting for her upstairs, presumably to physically show her how sorry he was. Marla smiled through fierce tears. How stupid could he be to think that sex was the way to heal her from the deathblow he’d dealt only a few hours ago?

She didn’t want to follow him. She didn’t want anything, but to lose herself in the awful mall painting his mother had given them on their last anniversary. It was a wash of muddy colors that perfectly depicted the murkiness of their relationship.

Marla remembered how she’d stood at the bottom of the staircase before ascending. Now she had reached the bottom of that same staircase again. She looked at Jonah remembering how the realization had come in that moment, five years ago. The many ways of dying and death can come in slow easy steps until you’re so completely removed from yourself that you don’t recognize yourself anymore. Words can kill.

“You killed me Jonah,” her eyes said even as she smiled in silence. “You killed me and you don’t’ even know it.”

“What shall we do today?” asked Jonah absentmindedly.

“I have no idea,” she replied. “I have no idea about anything at all.”

The Spectator

Celia clicked off the TV. The memorial service had been an abomination of art direction, meant to confer the idea that the mourners felt a connection to the corpse. She was certain most hadn’t known him, with their choreographed crying fits that only seemed to take place when a camera was nearby.

“So much for that,” she said taking another drag off her cigarette. “Top of the world Monday and dead on Friday.”

She looked at her watch and then out the window. Time had rushed through the rain washed streets of the boulevard leaving sparkling trails of glistening garbage, which soaked pedestrians hopped over to avoid homeless vets.

“Bet none of them realizes how good they’ve got it. That fool on the TV would give anything to be alive enough to be that wet and miserable.”

She stood watching them until the rain stopped and the hide-and-seek sun bashfully appeared from behind a cloud illuming the city from darkness to shadows.

“What next?” she asked sinking back down onto the couch. She wondered if the coverage of the services was finally over and the TV stations would return to the hours of mental mush meant to distract the bored from their boredom.

No such luck.

On every channel she clicked there was another moderator discussing the importance of the corpse from birth til death and then back again. Other channels carried rebroadcasts of the festivities filled with even more extreme close-ups of botoxed babes who hadn’t seen their twenties in thirty years but clung to the idea of everlasting youth.

“You probably think I’m jealous. What a joke. You’re nothing but a bunch of rotting old broads with big pocketbooks and nothing else better to do,” she yelled at the screen.

The hype hadn’t died down by the time night returned the noonday shadows to blackness. Celia continued to watch the news, now transfixed by lurid details of fatal habits fed to her in sound bytes by those who had known the former demigod. Apparently, he’d had a penchant for headboards, bondage and recreations of hell in torch lined dungeons. After he’d become famous, he’d dismissed all of his family and friends and replaced them with those he’d hired to execute his wishes.

Celia’s stomach howled like a lonely wolf through the slush of perversity blaring back at her from the TV screen. She’d forgotten to eat and it was past midnight. Her legs ached as she stood up for the first time in hours.

“I’m so grateful I never bought into such folly,” she said shuffling into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. “What a wasted life...”

After brushing her teeth, she looked into the mirror. The ceiling light cast a shadow across her face that caused her cheekbones to look pronounced. She struck model poses until she noticed that no matter what she did, her eyes looked empty, almost soulless.

“Time for bed, I guess,” she said still haunted by her reflection. The words, “you can’t take it with you. You can’t take it with you,” echoed off the walls as she pulled back her sheets.

Then she lay down on her bed unaware that this could have been her last day because tomorrow wasn’t a guarantee, while taxicabs and sirens echoed in the distance.

Osyei

Hope is not a harmless thing. It can move mountains of trouble, pulverizing them to bits at the moment of its birth. Joyous tears, moist with anticipation, trickle down like sparking reaching fingers, yearning and hungry to replenish the soul. You are the gift hope gave to me. I leap with elation. I yelp like a wolf eagerly calling her comrade. Join me in joyousness until sorrow turns to dust.

Osyei (pronounced ooh-dew-gee-guh-dee in English) is the word for hope in the Cherokee (Tsalagi) language.

Feathers

Photograph by Federico Erra

It started with the birds. They fell from the sky like heavy black rain littering the ground. The media gave explanations that didn’t make sense, yet there were those who willingly believed them, because that’s what some people always do. Others became frightened as more and more reports of natural creatures doing unnatural things continued. It was as if they were simultaneously abandoning ancient voices to spread destruction from one end of the earth to another.

Had the birds been scared or had they simply forgotten how to fly? There were no easy answers as some continued to wonder while others clung to normality in desperation for something concrete. In time, the government took over the giving of answers until the memory of birds and birdsong had completely disappeared. Nothing had happened because there was no such thing as a creature that could fly.

That was the time before and all mention or thought of the time before was banned now that Mother was in charge.

There was no reason to worry. The skies were completely empty now except for the occasional cloud, but no one took the time to notice such frivolity. Pleasing Mother was the only joy. No one saw her except for the photographs displayed around the  of encampment and inside every pod. Each day, she welcomed them in thunderous tones to hear the latest news the world.

“My children, the world is yours and you are the worlds. You are my children and you belong to me…”

For some reason, Harold found it difficult to focus on his work of loading and unloading empty boxes at the depot. Though he had taken his daily dose of Forget-Yourself pills, a wisp of something kept dragging him back to the time before Mother had come. He tried to fight it by repeating the words he’d been forced to suckle since Day One; “Memories are my enemies. Memories are my enemies. There is nothing but Mother. Mother is all.” But nothing worked to erase it.

His wife noticed something off in his expression when he entered their pod that night. She didn’t ask him what was the matter. She didn’t ask him anything at all. Well-trained wife that she was, she knew that Mother was the only one allowed to ask questions. Instead, she sat down and waited for Mother’s voice to tell them it was time to go to the rationing center for their evening meal.

Harold barely ate any of his daily allotment of bean curd and was scolded by one of the elder children for showing a lack of gratitude to Mother. The elder child forced him to chew every bite of his meal while loudly berating him.

Harold’s wife said nothing as she continued to eat. She didn’t look up or take notice of what was going on, but neither did anyone else. It was more important to be grateful to Mother.

“Mother is your friend and provider. She is the reason we are here. Mother loves us.”

After doing his duty to Mother, and once again attempting to impregnate his wife, Harold lay in the dark thinking about the wisp of the thing that had haunted him throughout the day. He didn’t know what it was. He only knew that it must have been something from the time before. He knew it should have scared him, but it didn’t. Harold also knew he couldn’t tell his wife, since it was a spouse’s duty to report everything to Mother. Besides, he was her third husband in five years, so clearly she had no qualms about dispatching him and allowing Mother to provide her with someone else.

Harold continued to concentrate on the delicate-black luminosity of the wisp, which glided above him. Sleep finally overtook him encircling him with wisps of memories containing faces, words and abandoned dreams. He slept satisfied for the first time since Mother had come and awoke in his still-darkened pod with images of fluttering wisps still circling overhead.

As he stepped out into the damp morning air, Harold looked up at the sky and smiled. Then he took a deep breath allowing his senses to awaken from the dead place Mother and Forget-Yourself pills had sentenced them. The air smelled sweet, and though Harold did not know what it was, it pleased him, just as the wisp of memory had pleased him. He did not care that others saw him or would view him as a blemish that required removal. He inhaled the air so deeply that he sighed, and then he did it again and again, until a sound rose his throat and forced itself free.

“Caw,” he screamed, before laughing for the first time in years. “Caw,” he screamed again, knowing that his wife would become an indifferent widow once more. Would others hear? Would they remember? Would remembering make a difference?

“Caw, caw, caw, caw!”

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except this moment and the delicate-black luminosity of a wisp. 

A Bird Lies Sleeping (Ghazel)

There’s an inside of me and an outside of me.

  A bird lies sleeping in the driveway.

My dreams live in-between, beyond the taint of truth’s caress.

  It is not willingly there, but was snatched by an unseen hand.

Sometimes I pretend I’m someone else when no one is looking.

  Looking at it, you’d never guess it was once able to fly.

My hands reach out hoping to touch more than mist.

  Its body is skeletal, but it’s wings remain.

Walking on pavement makes my feet long for softer things.

  It looks peaceful, even though it’s a crumpled heap.

The sun is so bright that it burns my eyes, yet I continue to stare.

  What made if fall? Was it the wind or did death catch it in midair?

A more plausible version of myself would understand.

  The bones aren’t white, but red. Its talons point like Pavlova’s toes.

When I smile, it’s always because I’m happy.

  Did something so wonderful ever realize that it was so carelessly free?