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Hey will you read it?
The Riptide Anniversary
Then I woke up. The phone had rung while I was boiling a pot of penne with marinara and whistling along with the radio’s rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth, decidedly dramatic music for cooking pasta. I had just had a shower, and globes of sweat still clung to my curls and fell in beads down the nape of my neck. The towel was slung on the sofa as it obstructed the view of muted commentators mulling the day's football and smut. The coffee table was set with my finest styrofoam and plasticware, and the wax of the single candle bled fire and congealed in pyroclast at it's glass base.
There was something of this day which seemed to demand a special attention, a jewel in the calendar coal and it was in my own instinct to memorialize it. The surprise for her couldn't hurt, I rationalized, for the sense of stagnation was too much to bear. A vacation, yes, a reunion from our drifting microcosm - even a transient one - would be a welcome one for her and I. And I'd spent the day shopping for the preparations, returning with the brown bags and set about the evening with preparations.
The ring, piercing the symphonic lull and crescendo of the radio, a constant siren which seemed to echo somewhere empty deep within myself. Ah, memory, and I was keenly aware of some black hole inside myself in which that ring echoed deep along the catacombs.
She'd called to give notice, in a voice that was both distant and sad: the commute had been hell, put on a pot of coffee, because the firm was working her to the fucking marrow; she had some new job prospects too - cheer up? I emptied the grinds into the filter and lit a cigarette as the steam percolated. What I'd wrought from nothing had returned to nothing, ashes to ashes.
The minutes passed standing there there, smoking a marlboro and sipping the last dredges of red wine. The world had shifted its axis, fallen from orbit, and in such state of eclipse all else was filtered, the mind’s colander collecting sediment as clarity bubbled forth like crystal.
By the time I became physically aware of my settings and poured the penne, overcooked and limp, into the sieve, the scalded sauce down the drain. In mechanical motions I washed the dishes, turned off the radio, the television, the candle and the dimmed lights; amusing, isn't it, that even in a state of personal anarchy we still cling to the daily routines imprinted in us? They permeate us to the core, on a level as deep as religion.
I crushed the cigarette in the tray by the stove, ashes to ashes.
I walked for hours along the Galveston seawall by our apartment - the great breakwater separating the city from the sea, and in the evening air the cracks of tattooed granite with spilled their minerals the dying breath of sun. The last rush hour traffic on the road aside me and lazy tourists dangling their legs over its edge allowed me some human comfort...my mind in its own practiced route crouching in it’s storm shelter. Better an empty space than a black hole. I bought a snow cone from a street vendor, at this point in a comfy state of anesthesia and dreams of employment and honeymoons. Better a crumbling space than a black hole.
The taste fast turned bittersweet on my tongue as the shelter reverted to malignance. We'd bought snowcones that same night. What subconscious urge could have possessed me to buy pina colada...I hate pina colada. At that moment I truly believed that the strongest of the senses tied to one's past is the sensation of taste; and I felt an overwhelming cold stickiness along the back of my trachea tinged with saccharine, repressed memories savored in pockets of syrup all descending to a pit below, the aftertaste of shame.
I paid a penance for hours, walking the same rhythm till my lungs ached with the hours toward the ferry to Bolivar Peninsula. The crossing was spent leaning against the stern of the ship, sipping a plastic cup of beer, as the moon traced its light along the conchoidal fractures of the waves like a sheet of stone. My voyage from the living, a ferryboat on the river Styx. The dead passengers and I under the watch of polar stars.
Ghosts don't bother me, for ghosts are only dead people, though the children squealing as they ran along the railing, these families asleep in their minivans gave me an overwhelming sense of sadness. These fingers trembled slighty as the pina colada-caked cone clung to their tips before sailing to the wake below. Release? I deep breath of gulf salt and diesel exhaust in the trade winds.
My strength regained, and when we reached Port Bolivar a handful of minutes past midnight I spent more hours wading knee-deep along the pitted beach of the coastline, my sneakers crusted in silt and broken shell, leaving craters which dissolved in the constant ebb and flow. The peninsula itself was a sunburnt strand of desolate shore, mom n’ pop bait stands, strips of beach houses on stilts where the laquer peeled in disuse. The existential feeling took root again, alone, though now human sorrow deep as Prometheus from his rock. I could see her running across the beach screaming, her summer clothes billowing like a sail, she had passed out in the surf and when I pulled her onto a bed of seaweed and loess her face was swollen with ponds of salt in her iris. Where was she now? Passed out on the couch with another TV dinner, a dull ache of care of what had become of me in the corner of her conscience.
A great shard of conch shell has washed up, jutting from the shore, and the acid of pina colada lingering in my mouth; its the subtleties, the small things in this life burrow the deepest into our histories and draw from our deepest reservoirs of memory. Stroking the great shell fragment, it was as though it were a token left, as though it had been dropped in concentration as he stuffed his ziploc bag with bits of conch and clam, mingling with collected sea weeds and pebbles. Those same clumsy fingers had given a go at de-veining the shrimps, pulling the spines from cracked carapaces. Leaving to wander the brave new world as I cooked the shrimp Vietnamese style in a pan over some driftwood and she prepared lemon pepper sauce, the sun bleeding beneath the arc of the sea.
The woman at the cheap hotel by the docks was dismayed at my presentation, a pre-dawn stranger still in the same thrift shop t-shirt and sweats I’d been lounging around my apartment in, now creased and saltswept from the night walk. She gave me the key to a room regardless, though the night was spent awake in the lobby’s cafeteria drinking the complimentary ice water and coffee. The black hole was still an acute sensation, but I’d developed a contempt for it now as a reluctant companion; my sisyphus stone, the eagle with pecked at my liver. I lit a cigarette, concentrating on the spiderweb which clung to the milk carafe. She’d left a few messages on my cell phone, and it was likely apathy or guilt which made me ignore them; it certainly wasn’t regret, for I felt the irrational martyrdom of a kamikaze.
I could remember from before his conception, our first time when her blood stained the linen, white as the oleanders by her house. He developed as an idea, born in the duality of two minds, only then actualized in flesh. My child, delivered so many years before the maternity ward, so intrinsically woven into my fibers. A face stared back at me from the water pitcher, unshaven and harrased like a vagrant; my face, I was responsibility. Staring deep into that transparency I felt a shame surpassing the usual guilt, a some form of sexual frustration in my genitalia. My face flushed, and at that moment humiliation channeled a rage towards everything; a natural disaster gathering around its eye, and those winds tethered there course toward the creature in the glass.
The pitcher shattered at the point of imact, the remaining base an interlocking mosaic while shards refracted the light from the linoleum of the cafeteria. It was followed by a subsequent collapse of plastic from the kitchen.
"Whe' you headid suh? Uh uh, come in heah fo' a while, keep a' old man compny"
How the voice had known I was stealing towards the safety of the lobby escaped me, and I redirected my steps gingerly on course to the peeled lacquer of the door behind a continental buffet.
"C'mon nah son, I ain't gon' bite'cha - hehe"
An unmistakeable trace of french creole in it's timbre, and it's weathered cadence seemed to draw me close. Scents of cajun spices reached a near overwhelming apex as I swung the door open and my eyes became bloodshot watery, overwhelmed.
"Weh nah, mistah neva slept a day in his life. Best get that clean propah' now. Commin in mah kitchen bleedin...man got no sense, no scruples..."
The cook hadn't even turned too acknowledge me, and I could tell from his profile there was an eccentic air about him, from the leftward tip of his upper torso to the tic of his right shoulder. His observation was dead on though, for at it's mention I could feel the sensation in my forearm where the fist had struck the pitcher; two thin lines where of filtered water was diluted in salt.
“Of course, besides I can't even bear the thought of my own insides right now...It's been a long night.”
“Yessuh it has. thas' why yo here. thas' why I'm here, cookin' like ah was homesick fo' preparin' some gran' fais-do-do. The g'lord puts us here right where we s'posed to be don' he?"
Washing my arm under one of the industrial sinks, he turned towards me, emptying some crabs from the sink into a pot on the stove. I was taken abit by his glass eye, its chipped iris lolling towards the top corner of it's lid, studded in creased skin and a mustache flecked with grey.
“Sides, you lost someone din'cha, like a mamaw or some blood n' water part o'ya, turned inta some cancer no docs cain't cure.”
There was a loud shrieking as he poured the boiling water over the crabs, the air escaping from their shells in steam.
“How d'you figure that? I never mentioned it."
“Why you thin ah'm cookin' a feast on instinct to hours unmention'ble? Ah tell you suh, losin' one sense heightens others...I seen things with'is bless'd hole than I seen with mah earthly one.”
He paused for a moment.
“You n' yo betta half was here a year go, weren't she? Withat young child spillin snow syrup n' sands ova our fine' carpets. Mah wife and I runs this heah place, suh.”
“The murderer always returns to the scene of the crime, I suppose.”
I mused with a self-deprecating smirk, wrapping my scraped arm. Nothing at this point could startle me. The one-eyed cajun decided to let the pot simmer, leaning against the counter and emptying at least a dozen sweet n' lows into a glass of iced tea.
“No, that won't be yo' judgement in the sweet rapture, no suh, not murder.”
“I raised him! I could have done something, she could have done something, probably had her mind on some goddamn legal brief, even on a vacation. It's not enough myself that I murdered him when I fell asleep, I murdered him after death - hiding his scent in cologne and and trading his face for the poker one in board rooms. Fitting that I lost that too, and with no paper and ink to clog it, I sacrificed her - us - to fill the hole”.
I had let loose on another tirade, and when I stopped to catch my breath I realized I'd been crying.
“He had a sweet smell though, he always smelled like the grass and the earth because he'd always have his knees dug in a garden - and then he'd run up like some puppy when I came home from work his palm filled with shells and stones. He had the sloppiest smile too...you know?”
I hadn't cried in years, the cajun just standing there nodding and spasming slightly from his tic. He motioned towards a tray of prailines next to the brouille he'd prepared, I filled a napkin with them and ate them ravenously till icing caked my fingers.
. “You want to know the black truth? When i'd awoken that night and saw him wading into the stars, the waves lapping over his nakedness, I felt like I should have done something, but I couldn't.”
I paused a moment to regain my thoughts.
“Earlier while I was wading along the coast and looking into the sea, I almost followed him in his path, till the undertow or one of the riptides caught hold and pulled me under, leaving a wake of bubbles. I'd walk until my nose and mouth poured saltwater into my body.”
A strange contortion twisted the face of the cajun's sallow complextion, and he blushed in a fervor.
“Dit mon verite! bible' black that! nuthin' gospel 'bout marrin' what the g'lord made in spittin' image suh, amen! The g'lord giveth and the g'lord taketh away..."
His sermon seemed to melt away as he put his vigor into stirring through the viscosity of the bubbling pot, muttering scriptures in soft tongues as he did, inflecting his trademark rhythm
I stumbled out of the kitchen, a patient leaving the hospital after the last stitch was sewn in place. It was already past dawn, and the lobby piped in jazz renditions of the beatles as the moon fell morning fell in pieces through the venetian blinds in the reception area, the morning star obscured in the corner. No guests had woken yet, and the only sounds were the hum of the air conditioner and the leaves, bloated with dew, rustling against the window.
It was a rather numb feel at first and I was aware of nothing but my surroundings, it was in that silence that an overwhelming sense of relief filled every fiber in my body. Everything was in its right place. For the first time I was aware that I was exactly where I was meant to be.
I left as I'd come, unburdened by possessions, and those same creased clothes where buffeted in the morning chill. My eyes were still squinted against it's brilliance on the glittering sea, fresh with the sounds of gulls and the early kayakers. The conch piece and the crumpled paper cone from last night had been kept in the pocket of my sweats, and I took them out and placed them by the crashing surf. It was time to let go. I staring past the jade expanse to the final arc of the gulf, savoring the memories, their taste as nuanced and sweet as pina colada. With trembling fingers, I dialed her number on my cell; I was calling home.
The Riptide Anniversary
Then I woke up. The phone had rung while I was boiling a pot of penne with marinara and whistling along with the radio’s rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth, decidedly dramatic music for cooking pasta. I had just had a shower, and globes of sweat still clung to my curls and fell in beads down the nape of my neck. The towel was slung on the sofa as it obstructed the view of muted commentators mulling the day's football and smut. The coffee table was set with my finest styrofoam and plasticware, and the wax of the single candle bled fire and congealed in pyroclast at it's glass base.
There was something of this day which seemed to demand a special attention, a jewel in the calendar coal and it was in my own instinct to memorialize it. The surprise for her couldn't hurt, I rationalized, for the sense of stagnation was too much to bear. A vacation, yes, a reunion from our drifting microcosm - even a transient one - would be a welcome one for her and I. And I'd spent the day shopping for the preparations, returning with the brown bags and set about the evening with preparations.
The ring, piercing the symphonic lull and crescendo of the radio, a constant siren which seemed to echo somewhere empty deep within myself. Ah, memory, and I was keenly aware of some black hole inside myself in which that ring echoed deep along the catacombs.
She'd called to give notice, in a voice that was both distant and sad: the commute had been hell, put on a pot of coffee, because the firm was working her to the fucking marrow; she had some new job prospects too - cheer up? I emptied the grinds into the filter and lit a cigarette as the steam percolated. What I'd wrought from nothing had returned to nothing, ashes to ashes.
The minutes passed standing there there, smoking a marlboro and sipping the last dredges of red wine. The world had shifted its axis, fallen from orbit, and in such state of eclipse all else was filtered, the mind’s colander collecting sediment as clarity bubbled forth like crystal.
By the time I became physically aware of my settings and poured the penne, overcooked and limp, into the sieve, the scalded sauce down the drain. In mechanical motions I washed the dishes, turned off the radio, the television, the candle and the dimmed lights; amusing, isn't it, that even in a state of personal anarchy we still cling to the daily routines imprinted in us? They permeate us to the core, on a level as deep as religion.
I crushed the cigarette in the tray by the stove, ashes to ashes.
I walked for hours along the Galveston seawall by our apartment - the great breakwater separating the city from the sea, and in the evening air the cracks of tattooed granite with spilled their minerals the dying breath of sun. The last rush hour traffic on the road aside me and lazy tourists dangling their legs over its edge allowed me some human comfort...my mind in its own practiced route crouching in it’s storm shelter. Better an empty space than a black hole. I bought a snow cone from a street vendor, at this point in a comfy state of anesthesia and dreams of employment and honeymoons. Better a crumbling space than a black hole.
The taste fast turned bittersweet on my tongue as the shelter reverted to malignance. We'd bought snowcones that same night. What subconscious urge could have possessed me to buy pina colada...I hate pina colada. At that moment I truly believed that the strongest of the senses tied to one's past is the sensation of taste; and I felt an overwhelming cold stickiness along the back of my trachea tinged with saccharine, repressed memories savored in pockets of syrup all descending to a pit below, the aftertaste of shame.
I paid a penance for hours, walking the same rhythm till my lungs ached with the hours toward the ferry to Bolivar Peninsula. The crossing was spent leaning against the stern of the ship, sipping a plastic cup of beer, as the moon traced its light along the conchoidal fractures of the waves like a sheet of stone. My voyage from the living, a ferryboat on the river Styx. The dead passengers and I under the watch of polar stars.
Ghosts don't bother me, for ghosts are only dead people, though the children squealing as they ran along the railing, these families asleep in their minivans gave me an overwhelming sense of sadness. These fingers trembled slighty as the pina colada-caked cone clung to their tips before sailing to the wake below. Release? I deep breath of gulf salt and diesel exhaust in the trade winds.
My strength regained, and when we reached Port Bolivar a handful of minutes past midnight I spent more hours wading knee-deep along the pitted beach of the coastline, my sneakers crusted in silt and broken shell, leaving craters which dissolved in the constant ebb and flow. The peninsula itself was a sunburnt strand of desolate shore, mom n’ pop bait stands, strips of beach houses on stilts where the laquer peeled in disuse. The existential feeling took root again, alone, though now human sorrow deep as Prometheus from his rock. I could see her running across the beach screaming, her summer clothes billowing like a sail, she had passed out in the surf and when I pulled her onto a bed of seaweed and loess her face was swollen with ponds of salt in her iris. Where was she now? Passed out on the couch with another TV dinner, a dull ache of care of what had become of me in the corner of her conscience.
A great shard of conch shell has washed up, jutting from the shore, and the acid of pina colada lingering in my mouth; its the subtleties, the small things in this life burrow the deepest into our histories and draw from our deepest reservoirs of memory. Stroking the great shell fragment, it was as though it were a token left, as though it had been dropped in concentration as he stuffed his ziploc bag with bits of conch and clam, mingling with collected sea weeds and pebbles. Those same clumsy fingers had given a go at de-veining the shrimps, pulling the spines from cracked carapaces. Leaving to wander the brave new world as I cooked the shrimp Vietnamese style in a pan over some driftwood and she prepared lemon pepper sauce, the sun bleeding beneath the arc of the sea.
The woman at the cheap hotel by the docks was dismayed at my presentation, a pre-dawn stranger still in the same thrift shop t-shirt and sweats I’d been lounging around my apartment in, now creased and saltswept from the night walk. She gave me the key to a room regardless, though the night was spent awake in the lobby’s cafeteria drinking the complimentary ice water and coffee. The black hole was still an acute sensation, but I’d developed a contempt for it now as a reluctant companion; my sisyphus stone, the eagle with pecked at my liver. I lit a cigarette, concentrating on the spiderweb which clung to the milk carafe. She’d left a few messages on my cell phone, and it was likely apathy or guilt which made me ignore them; it certainly wasn’t regret, for I felt the irrational martyrdom of a kamikaze.
I could remember from before his conception, our first time when her blood stained the linen, white as the oleanders by her house. He developed as an idea, born in the duality of two minds, only then actualized in flesh. My child, delivered so many years before the maternity ward, so intrinsically woven into my fibers. A face stared back at me from the water pitcher, unshaven and harrased like a vagrant; my face, I was responsibility. Staring deep into that transparency I felt a shame surpassing the usual guilt, a some form of sexual frustration in my genitalia. My face flushed, and at that moment humiliation channeled a rage towards everything; a natural disaster gathering around its eye, and those winds tethered there course toward the creature in the glass.
The pitcher shattered at the point of imact, the remaining base an interlocking mosaic while shards refracted the light from the linoleum of the cafeteria. It was followed by a subsequent collapse of plastic from the kitchen.
"Whe' you headid suh? Uh uh, come in heah fo' a while, keep a' old man compny"
How the voice had known I was stealing towards the safety of the lobby escaped me, and I redirected my steps gingerly on course to the peeled lacquer of the door behind a continental buffet.
"C'mon nah son, I ain't gon' bite'cha - hehe"
An unmistakeable trace of french creole in it's timbre, and it's weathered cadence seemed to draw me close. Scents of cajun spices reached a near overwhelming apex as I swung the door open and my eyes became bloodshot watery, overwhelmed.
"Weh nah, mistah neva slept a day in his life. Best get that clean propah' now. Commin in mah kitchen bleedin...man got no sense, no scruples..."
The cook hadn't even turned too acknowledge me, and I could tell from his profile there was an eccentic air about him, from the leftward tip of his upper torso to the tic of his right shoulder. His observation was dead on though, for at it's mention I could feel the sensation in my forearm where the fist had struck the pitcher; two thin lines where of filtered water was diluted in salt.
“Of course, besides I can't even bear the thought of my own insides right now...It's been a long night.”
“Yessuh it has. thas' why yo here. thas' why I'm here, cookin' like ah was homesick fo' preparin' some gran' fais-do-do. The g'lord puts us here right where we s'posed to be don' he?"
Washing my arm under one of the industrial sinks, he turned towards me, emptying some crabs from the sink into a pot on the stove. I was taken abit by his glass eye, its chipped iris lolling towards the top corner of it's lid, studded in creased skin and a mustache flecked with grey.
“Sides, you lost someone din'cha, like a mamaw or some blood n' water part o'ya, turned inta some cancer no docs cain't cure.”
There was a loud shrieking as he poured the boiling water over the crabs, the air escaping from their shells in steam.
“How d'you figure that? I never mentioned it."
“Why you thin ah'm cookin' a feast on instinct to hours unmention'ble? Ah tell you suh, losin' one sense heightens others...I seen things with'is bless'd hole than I seen with mah earthly one.”
He paused for a moment.
“You n' yo betta half was here a year go, weren't she? Withat young child spillin snow syrup n' sands ova our fine' carpets. Mah wife and I runs this heah place, suh.”
“The murderer always returns to the scene of the crime, I suppose.”
I mused with a self-deprecating smirk, wrapping my scraped arm. Nothing at this point could startle me. The one-eyed cajun decided to let the pot simmer, leaning against the counter and emptying at least a dozen sweet n' lows into a glass of iced tea.
“No, that won't be yo' judgement in the sweet rapture, no suh, not murder.”
“I raised him! I could have done something, she could have done something, probably had her mind on some goddamn legal brief, even on a vacation. It's not enough myself that I murdered him when I fell asleep, I murdered him after death - hiding his scent in cologne and and trading his face for the poker one in board rooms. Fitting that I lost that too, and with no paper and ink to clog it, I sacrificed her - us - to fill the hole”.
I had let loose on another tirade, and when I stopped to catch my breath I realized I'd been crying.
“He had a sweet smell though, he always smelled like the grass and the earth because he'd always have his knees dug in a garden - and then he'd run up like some puppy when I came home from work his palm filled with shells and stones. He had the sloppiest smile too...you know?”
I hadn't cried in years, the cajun just standing there nodding and spasming slightly from his tic. He motioned towards a tray of prailines next to the brouille he'd prepared, I filled a napkin with them and ate them ravenously till icing caked my fingers.
. “You want to know the black truth? When i'd awoken that night and saw him wading into the stars, the waves lapping over his nakedness, I felt like I should have done something, but I couldn't.”
I paused a moment to regain my thoughts.
“Earlier while I was wading along the coast and looking into the sea, I almost followed him in his path, till the undertow or one of the riptides caught hold and pulled me under, leaving a wake of bubbles. I'd walk until my nose and mouth poured saltwater into my body.”
A strange contortion twisted the face of the cajun's sallow complextion, and he blushed in a fervor.
“Dit mon verite! bible' black that! nuthin' gospel 'bout marrin' what the g'lord made in spittin' image suh, amen! The g'lord giveth and the g'lord taketh away..."
His sermon seemed to melt away as he put his vigor into stirring through the viscosity of the bubbling pot, muttering scriptures in soft tongues as he did, inflecting his trademark rhythm
I stumbled out of the kitchen, a patient leaving the hospital after the last stitch was sewn in place. It was already past dawn, and the lobby piped in jazz renditions of the beatles as the moon fell morning fell in pieces through the venetian blinds in the reception area, the morning star obscured in the corner. No guests had woken yet, and the only sounds were the hum of the air conditioner and the leaves, bloated with dew, rustling against the window.
It was a rather numb feel at first and I was aware of nothing but my surroundings, it was in that silence that an overwhelming sense of relief filled every fiber in my body. Everything was in its right place. For the first time I was aware that I was exactly where I was meant to be.
I left as I'd come, unburdened by possessions, and those same creased clothes where buffeted in the morning chill. My eyes were still squinted against it's brilliance on the glittering sea, fresh with the sounds of gulls and the early kayakers. The conch piece and the crumpled paper cone from last night had been kept in the pocket of my sweats, and I took them out and placed them by the crashing surf. It was time to let go. I staring past the jade expanse to the final arc of the gulf, savoring the memories, their taste as nuanced and sweet as pina colada. With trembling fingers, I dialed her number on my cell; I was calling home.