Reading Room
AMELAND
I cheated death. I walked across the sea. When the tide was low I went over the furrowed sandbanks in my small bare feet. I skipped school one day and traveled to an island near my home called Ameland. I had heard stories, every child who lived in the Netherlands knew the stories, about the mud like quicksand and about the water like a great grey wall when the tide came in and how it could catch you and knock you down and pour into your mouth and drown you so that you couldn’t ever return, no matter how hard you tried to climb out of the mud like quicksand and over the great grey wall. But I returned. I went back to the nuns who had been tolling bells, looking for me. When they found me they showed me their palms, raw from pulling the bell’s rope and they took me to the headmistress for punishment. Walking to her chambers I whispered proudly into the black folds of their habits. I have walked across the sea. Later, my whispers came out as the nuns kneeled for Mass, released like cold air once trapped in a cellar, now mixing with their prayers.
I knew my walk at low tide to the island of Ameland would always be with me. I was to walk it years later, again and again, in bed with men who snored beside me, a meaty arm of theirs across my chest. In the hot sweaty jungles of Java I walked the wet sand to Ameland and did not always smell the smell of the lotus growing out my window, but instead I smelled the cold salt spray of the ocean of my homeland. I walked my walk to Ameland most often in the prison of St. Lazare, where every stone on the floor of my cell held a trip for me across the darkened sand where, when I walked back, I turned around and looked over my shoulder to watch the sea advancing. Try and catch me, I said out loud and what answered back was the sky, at first in low rumbles, then louder as thunder rolled closer. But it never did catch me, and I outran the tide and lived.
* * *
First there is flour, mother said in the kitchen. Then the eggs. With the flour on her hands, puffing up along her arms, she was already becoming a ghost.
The cake she made was for my birthday. My father said that in a country called Mexico the birthday child’s face is pushed into the cake. For good luck and a long life, he said.
Not in this country, my mother said and she slid the cake away from me so that I would not push my face into her frosting, spread with a spoon so that it looked like small cuppy waves, curved tips held suspended in a gentle roll.
Father said, Next birthday when you are fifteen Marguerite, you can do it.
Later, in his store, father showed me a hat.
Touch it, he said. He rubbed the soft felt against my cheek. Think of the animal that died so that this hat could be made from its fur, he said.
I pushed the hat away. I wanted to think of all the men who would wear the hat and the parties they would wear it to.
Father put the hat in the window to display it, but I knew that in an hour or so he would take it down and replace it with another hat from a shelf inside the store. By doing this, he kept the colors of the hats from fading in the sun.
Father was not there for my next birthday. He closed up his shop. He took down all the hats and sold them at reduction and held the cash in his hand and licked his fingertips to count without making a mistake. I sat in the storefront window. The sun beat down through the glass and I now knew how quickly the hats could fade and lose their color and I thought how funny that was because everyone had always told me to stay out of the sun, saying it would make my olive skin darker.
After he was gone, all that was left of him was a flowered vest he once wore that hung in the closet. The cloth of the vest was stretched around the waist, where the girth of him had pushed against the cloth. Mother never put anything else in the closet and if I opened the door quickly, the breeze would set the flowered vest in motion on the wooden hangar.
He gave us no address. He left saying he would come for us after he found a job in the south.
Mother cried at night. There were holes in the walls, large patches where the paint was peeling and the plaster was crumbling. I thought her cries would enter the holes and stay forever in the house, trapped and ricocheting behind our walls. I tried to drown out the cries by pounding out songs on the keys of the piano, but all that happened was the paint peeled even more, the plaster crumbled to the floor and left small white piles like those inside a sand timer, marking hours that could not be turned upside down.
I found mother dead in the kitchen. The white flour was on her apron. It was up her arms. It was between the laces of her boots. It was in her mouth. The doctor said she died from an infection in her lungs. I thought she died from breathing in the flour. From the inside out, it turned her into a ghost. I never went into that kitchen again. The kitchen can kill you, I thought. I closed my eyes and was walking across the sea. Each time I remembered it, it was as if I was more there than the first time. I noticed more things. The white sand crabs burrowing beside my feet. The water coming in, the bubbles springing up from beneath me, filling in between my toes, creeping up the hem of my silk skirt.
from HERE
THEY COME
by Yannick Murphy
Here come the hot dog men. Fuck, if they aren't all foreign, all coming from lands with camels and beaches with black volcanic ash for sand or lands with wives with scarves up to the eyes, lands where love is through a hole in the bedsheet, lands where marriages are on hilltops, and goats, bell-necked, graze nearby. They are silent down the avenue except for the wheels of their carts and the slosh of the water their long skinny hot dogs float in. So early down the avenue there are hardly any cars, and they own the lanes, pushing their carts down the middle wearing sometimes three sweaters, their arms bulging in nubby hand-knitted yarns, their shoes sometimes not shoes, just sandals worn with socks, their hair greased or just greasy, the dandruff held tight behind bars of coarse strands of thick prickly hair at the napes of their cross-hatched necks.
I see them coming down the avenue from my fire escape, their cart umbrellas folded in. Their slow walk is like an amble through a still sleeping village alongside a donkeydrawn wooden-wheeled cart loaded with bundles of sticks for starting small fires.
I know the one walking past the Charlie Bar across the street. He is named John. He gives me a Hershey from the bin at the bottom that stores the spongy buns. In summer I sit on his lap when it is slow, and morning, and eat the Hershey while I feel his fingers creeping up my waist and to my tits. Meanwhile, the hot dogs boil, the sauerkraut warms, and the sodas cool on ice.
John doesn't have front teeth. He says it's from eating rocks baked in bread where he comes from. He takes pictures of me with a camera he wears around his neck and shows me them developed. Bad pictures where the sun is behind me and I'm a whoosh of bright light, or under a park bush, too dark to be seen, maybe just my leg on the dirt that is patted-down park dirt, run over by rats at night and where minty gum wrapper is thrown throughout the day.
