“Didja know, princess,” says mermaid Mina with three fingers dipping into the hazy waters of a pool, “that there’s a difference between wreck and wreckage?”

“Nu-uh! They’re synonyms, silly.” Spitfire Dahlia retorts in her mother’s most hoity-toity tone.

Mina looks over at her disdainfully.

“Naw, I’m joking, joking. What’s the difference?”

“Wreck is used when the structure is still recognizable. Wreckage is used when it no longer is.”

“Huh. Is that right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Dahlia returns to her inspection of the rotting pier. The sky is a perfect white, and all around Dahlia lie colorless barnacles and deep green algae like shredded party streamers. The wood creaks and sighs as she steps on it in her cobalt Mary-Janes , exuding sweet-smelling water. It’s cool and very quiet. Only Mina’s clumsy humming breaks the spell of the tense waves and brittle landscape. Dahlia licks away the last taste of that morning’s orange juice from her lips, staring out at the featureless ocean. A few minutes pass before she notices the carcass immediately to her right.

“Oh great Gods!” she cries. Mina comes to her side, as close as possible without touching her. She follows Dahlia’s gaze and finds the bird. It is lying on its back, head turned to one side. Beginning at its throat is a clean gash, making its way through its miniature organs and tissues before tapering off midway. The insides have swollen and cracked in the heat, bursting out and bubbling up. Blood and yellow plasma has been soaked up by the boards and the wing bent back.

“Wreckage.” says Mina.

“The deathplace of thousands of seagulls.” says Dahlia bitterly. “Jeez, this is awful.”

“Princess, you ain’t kidding.”

“I’m going home. I just, oh jeez, this was supposed to be nice. I’m going home, dammit.”

“Wait. Hey, wait a second.” Mina has her hand on Dahlia’s bony shoulder. “Hey, listen.”

“What?”

Mina eyes her closely. “Okay. Well. Have you ever heard of the bell?”

FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE:

PART THE FIRST

PART THE SECOND

PART THE THIRD

Please choose your favorite blog post trend of mine (gosh darn it why are they so many I don’t even know I NEED ORDER), though you can rest assured I will write about them all eventually.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank y’all for reading and commenting on this here blog, despite its infrequent posting schedule and my melodramatic, punctuation-less writing style. Thank you very much!

]]> http://conscienceround.com/archives/1885/feed 5 http://conscienceround.com/archives/1876 http://conscienceround.com/archives/1876#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:51:26 +0000 Em http://conscienceround.com/?p=1876 I am home alone, adding dollops of butter to a pot of Basmati rice. Some housewife chord has been struck in me during the fits of sleep, along with a bout of sickness.

(here, “sickness” is defined as a state of mind caused by one-quarter stomach upset and three-quarters loneliness.)

Rice pudding calls for one cup of cooked rice, milk and sugar. I turn the knobs of our gas stove in one of my mother’s cross-stitch sweaters. It’s older than I am, a relic belonging to the age of my mother’s young adulthood. The last time it was worn, she was an unmarried Londoner, bopping around in pastel work pants and dark shades. Now, I am the daughter who has taken it from the wardrobe, but I have neither spunk nor savvy, not today.

Samsara, “continuous flow”, the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Then, can be it assumed I am a body travelling a circular path at a constant speed? This is a principle of uniform circular motion, something I was taught last year in sophomore physics. I can still remember my polyester uniform skirt sticking to the backs of my knees, sweat like cake batter, and my breath a tangible print in the air. Question four: calculate the velocity of an object travelling in a circle.

(here and in the realm of physics, “speed” refers to how fast an object is moving, whereas “velocity” is the rate at which it changes position.)

Samsara, a cycle in which I am the body stapled, marked and labelled, drawn as a dot in religious textbooks. But though speed is constant in a circular environment, I can change the velocity. I can accelerate or de-accelerate if that is my wish, though I am bound by egoism and futile desire.

A six square meter kitchen with a small balcony where clothes dry and detergent is kept. The oyster-colored tiles and cabinets of poor-quality wood, the porcelain bowls of green apples slowly ripening, and I, sitting at a dirty table eating salted crackers because my rice pudding has the taste and texture of charcoal.

I am reading “Madame Bovary.” Doleful and desperate Emma makes me smile, but I only ever want to be her twin in name. And on the days when I feel myself leaning towards her awful habits, I pretend my name is not “Emma” but “Ema”, and this small change seems significant because -

(here and everywhere, “Ema” are the small wooden plaques on which Shinto worshipers write their wishes, prayers, vows or expressions of thanks. Ema is hung up in shrines, where it reaches the gods.)

Consider, for example, the bestial child who hammers his hips up and down in the most convincing rendition of childbirth (as performed by a male – bravo!) ever seen in a school room. Or the deeply caustic boy, who pushes himself up and down like a baby being rocked, calves tightening like hard-boiled eggs. Or the fellow who flaps like a bird, neck straight and stiff. Or the super-sprint of the sleek schoolgirl. Or the damsel who begins to swell and purple at the midway mark, huffing and puffing all the way to the finish, mermaid hair spread out on the iceberg blue mat.

I myself appear to be the kind of person who flags three sit-ups from the goal, flopping flat on the ground like a dead cetacean, grunting and gagging on the last available breath before elbowing and easing up again. One. Two. And. Aaaaaaaand. Three.

“Can’t do it with him around,” she says, licking her lips colored Yellow Number Five. “and even if I did, just look, just look at ‘im! He’d snitch to Momma for sure.”

Auntie chomps down on her teeth, Pan-Cake foundation wet on her hook nose and sloping collarbone, offering Dahlia nothing. She knows better now, than to give the child reason to believe she agrees with her. Momma! Auntie thinks your new hub’s a tattler too, she went and told me so! Ohoho, not going to happen again, Auntie’s determined, the babe can be kamikaze all by her lonesome.

Auntie’s eyes paw Dahlia’s courtesan’s bouffant and fingernails, painted with orange permanent marker and glitter glue.

“I know, Auntie,” Dahlia whines, “but how was I supposed to get dressed up for this, huh? It’d be like letting Momma win.”

Auntie’s sympathizes, but not enough to brave the primeval waters of mother-daughter conflict. The cellophane mammalian eyes, which through the magic of natural selection are also Dahlia’s own, circle once, twice, careening from the daylily flower arrangements (Dahlia thinks monocotyledon, sophomore Biology, Miss Rittenhouse’s China red cardigans) to the collapsing Neapolitan ice cream cake dead center (Dahlia thinks sacarose, fructose, lactose, I want to go home, I want to go home).

Color-alternating strobe lights, Mr. and Mrs. Samson Faktorowicz waltz by, merry-go-round, tight turns and whorls quick enough to make the brand-spanking-new Dahlia Faktorowicz’s head spin. It’s a storybook affair, but Samson ruins the effect by letting his hands stray below Dahlia’s mother’s waist, and she, the DayGlo princess rotting, lets him, drunk and reveling, revolving, revealing.

“Oh Good Gad,” Dahlia says, “great Gods. Save your humble servant.”

“Better get used to it,” Auntie says, unable to resist getting a hit in with her perilous problem niece, “you’re going on their honeymoon, aren’t you?”

Churning loud, huffing and puffing, a wounded Dahlia skulks out to the parking lot.

It’s difficult for me to consider myself an “older student”. I’m shy of even first graders, tracing wide arcs around they and their playthings. School feels like a spherical environment, and I take a path lit by an infinite series of great circles. One of few stopping points: the cafeteria.

The tables are always occupied. The galaxy by the windows, threaded by cosmic rays and globular star clusters, all gravitationally bound, wound up tight. The string of outer space accompanying the bar, populated by the old glowing inapproachable. The mess in between, solar wind and magnetic fields, perilous and easy to trip over. I find a chair and carry it with me to the solar system farthest away.

It’s a quaint place where I am comfortable, if plenty superfluous. If they care they say nothing, fixed as they are on breaking past their orbits and poking fun at dwarf planets. There’s a pair of blazar boys, luminous and disruptive, a shiny hypercompact stellar system, a trio of components of the Orion constellation (three vertices of a triangle, Sirius, Procyon and Betelgeuse) and me, the closest thing to a perfect vacuum.

Nature abhors a vacuum, but you are not nature, you are expansive, wild and intergalactic, spanning light years and eons, you are teenage stars, so, can I ask you, please: don’t hate me.

I am only ever truly tired the five minutes after I wake, but it is not until eleven thirty that I stop telling people I’m exhausted. It’s one of the few conversation openers I know, initiating the inevitable concurrent response, the cycle of shared sleep and lack thereof. “I’m tired.” “I’m tired too.” “How are you?” “Fine.” “Hello!” “Hi.” I am an automaton, I run through lists like names for hurricanes.

For the first time in a while, I hate living in Spain. It’s a feeling that lasts a maximum half hour, but I feel it poignantly, and I feel it absolutely. I can’t do intelligent or passionate discourse in Spanish, despite the fact that I’ve lived here for most of my life. All those who cannot express adoration nor ideals in their mother tongue are failures. On a discrete level in my private universe I am blind to the interpretation of the thoughts of other sentient beings. On a smaller level than even that, lying on the fringe of some dead supernova, I fear that I am blind to their love as well.

There is a sun, but it cannot be pinpointed. There are blue stars too, but they are visible only to those with proper equipment. The only element ever to be mapped here is ground zero, and I already know exactly where that is.

When my mother finishes, she goes to the window, pulling open the curtain as though ripping open a candy bar. We’d had overcast weather that morning, and so I see it fit to ask “is it raining?” to which my mother answers “more than that, it’s hailing”. Her tone is so high and so sharp she might as well have been swearing. My mother is terrified of storms.

We go down and find the doorman behind the glass door, keeping an eye on the silvery plaza. My mother says she’s never seen a storm this bad, though I can clearly recall us driving through a much worse one not a full year beforehand. She leaves for a moment, and reappears with a white umbrella. She says she’s been lent it, although there is no one left in the building who could have lent her such a thing.

The sidewalk is empty. Once in a while a couple will emerge, wet arms swinging. At one point we see an entire family, dressed in bright soaked shorts and carrying tote bags made of dark straw. The daughter, walking down the asphalt with the air of a martyr, is barefoot.

Everyone seems to have crowded into the phone store across the road. They’re all the English tourists, riding out the rain. It doesn’t take long, and soon enough I have convinced my mother to brave the trip to the metro stop.

“Afraid of a little thunder and lightning?” I say, or something to that effect. “What the heck?”

But as we wade through the dips and tucks in the street I see a girl on a street corner who is clearly terrified of that little thunder, little lightning. She’s of at least partial Oriental descent, though now, in retrospect, I cannot pluck out her features from the muck of memory. All I can remember is her black hair, and her arms, which were wrapped around a boy, who should be more properly termed a young man, though I think of him only as a boy. He had a buzz cut and broad shoulders, and one of his hands was patting her head while the other held firm to the puzzle piece of the small of her back.

We soon leave them be, and as we are making through the narrow streets so isolated one could be the paradise of monsoon and another a stark churning desert, the water slows and the clouds clear, as we are passing paralyzed stray dogs and marble store fronts, I think, in passing, a thought that is perhaps number 450 of the 700 I think per minute, stuck between one triviality and the next: THAT WAS BEAUTIFUL.

(title is never mine, but only Theodore Roethke’s, a line from his “The Storm”)

Actually I am not sorry at all. Why is every Emma a Venetian blond, eternally young heiress of industry or at the very least beauty, the authentic Woodhouse?

I want an Emma with uncut nails and a long neck. The curve of her back is warm, a mid-ocean ridge swimming with neon monkfish, and the skin behind her ear is like that of a white nectarine, or dark yellow Mirabelle plum. She can be as dirty as dishwater or as pure as the driven snow, femme fatale or Galatea. Hair gelled, ridden with lice, bronze glasses, bombastic. I want a gutsy Emma, a gutted Emma, salty, sour, housefly, dragonfly Emma.

She can be a spongy Swiss mademoiselle, hardboiled American lass, delicate Buddhist princess, mooney extraterrestrial damsel. My Emma is a prostitute, a seller of exotic curios, a British matchmaker as dear Jane Austen intended her to be. She gets to go home happy or up in smoke.

The whole time I was reading “Lolita” I was waiting for Nabokov to allude to the literal meaning of the name Dolores. Dolores, in Spanish, meaning sorrow, pains. He took that name apart and put it back together again, put little Lolita in every kind of metaphor, simile, allusion, elevated her to a special plane of literary beauty. But never does he once mention what the dictionary has to say about Dolores. Not once does he say, “and this is Dolores, and her future is sadness, as her name so indicates.”

Maybe that’s what I really want for my pen and paper Emma.

It makes me laugh, to come into Casa del Llibre and spot the exact four books I doled out more money to buy more than six thousand miles away, in a New York Barnes & Noble. There’s even a Murakami I could not find on Fifth Avenue, and it’s somehow reasonably priced, even though this is Europe and nothing in Europe is reasonable. That I could have purchased my beloved novels here at home, ending my year long literary starvation period, if I had just thought to check at Casa del Llibre and see if they had renewed their usually mediocre stock!

Clearly this is turn of events can only be explained by my terrible luck, which I shall hereby personify as a hateful, or at the very least excessively mischeivous Book Lord. In artistic depictions of this Book Lord, one should never forget to include the Rasputin beard, skull-topped sceptre and the burning pile of wonderful literature in the foreground (scenery should evoke Holy Inquisition period Spain, or, alternatively, the planet Hoth.)

Perhaps it is high time I purchase myself a Kindle.