heroines:Me llueven los ojos (via Variableimaginaria)
Reblogged from heroines
With You
Maria tried to listen to the priest, but she found herself instead transfixed by her grandfather’s casket. The wood was dark and polished so smooth it shone. The lid was open, but from where Maria sat in the pew, she couldn’t see her grandfather - only that the coffin was lined with something that looked like white velvet.
The church was mostly empty and Maria knew no one. It had been many years since she had set foot inside any kind of religious building.
There were a few middle aged couples with politely bowed heads. Maria watched a man removed a hard candy from his wife’s purse and coughed to cover the sound as he unwrapped it. As he brought his hand back down from his mouth, he ran his fingers casually over his wife’s knee. The woman’s expression didn’t change as she crossed her legs so her foot was pressed against her husband’s.
Maria tried not to stare. She felt conspicuous and worried someone would approach her and demand to know who she was and what right she had to be there.
No one spoke to Maria.
Of course the real problem was Maria didn’t know why she had come. She had never met her grandfather. Everything she knew about him was contained in a shoebox she kept hidden under her bed.
The email from her mother was curt, but that was in the woman’s nature. Maria’s mother didn’t speak about her parents or her childhood. She certainly never mentioned that her father was in a home in Virginia less than a three hour drive away from Maria’s one-bedroom apartment in D.C.
Maria had tried to convince her brother, Paul, to go, but he brushed her aside. “Why?” he asked. “Mom has everything in order.” Maria pouted, begged, tried to tell him it would be a good bonding experience for them, that she would pay for the ticket, that she hadn’t seen him in a year, but he couldn’t be swayed. He said,”I didn’t know the man.”
After their phone call, Maria had cried. Paul hadn’t even asked her about the recital that she had written him about so enthusiastically a week earlier.
There was no discussion whether their mother would return to the states for the funeral. She would be spending the day traveling from her office in Nairobi to Kisumu to negotiate microloans.
Maria’s father would have come if she had asked him. He would have flown from Jakarta that night, but then he was a diplomat and it was in his nature to attend ceremonies at the behest of other people. He would have taken her out for dinner afterwards and asked,”How are you handling this?” He would have asked about her music and said,”I’m so happy for you. You deserve success.” Then he would give her canned replies when she asked about the embassy and excused himself early to get work done in his hotel room.
Maria didn’t consider contacting her father. She preferred her mother’s brand of earnest neglect to her father’s calculated interest.
The priest’s voice droned. Maria wondered if he viewed this funeral as practice for a more important one. She tried to concentrate, but she could hear only fragments. “…Eugene was many things during life…”
She had only been to one funeral before and that was when she was seventeen and living in Cairo. Her best friend, Maha, had been killed in a car accident. Within hours of hearing, Maria was with Maha’s family as they carried her coffin through narrow streets to the cemetery. She had never seen Egyptian men cry before, but they wept openly then and called out to God. The women screamed and were shoved away from the body. The coffin rocked back and forth as everyone reached to carry it at once. People seemed to appear from all around them. The crowd swelled and Maria bawled until she felt like there was nothing left inside.
“…leaves behind a daughter… two grandchildren… unfortunately, none of them could be here today, but I know they will join with me in…”
Maria’s legs were asleep. She shifted her weight back and forth on the hard seat of the pew. She stamped her feet against the floor.
“…be again with his wife, Mary, who was taken from him by cancer in…”
Maria stood. The priest stopped. They held one another’s gaze. The man had tired, drooping eyes. Maria thought he looked as if he were going to say something directly to her. She turned and hurried down the aisle. Behind her, the priest instructed everyone to open their hymnals and the organist began to play.
When Maria reached the heavy church doors, she looked back and contemplated the body in the coffin.
The next morning, back in D.C. Maria took the worn cardboard shoebox from under her bed. She sat on the floor and counted the faded letters inside the box. They were meticulously arranged by date: “January 11th, 1939, My dearest Mary” through “December 12th, 1961, My poor, sweet, suffering Mary.” When she was content they were all there, she flipped to the last page of the last letter.
“I’ll take the first train home and be by your side before you know it - there to smother you with my lips and hold tight your hand. I long for your touch always.”
Maria returned the letters to the box. She shut the cardboard lid and sealed it with duct tape. Then she went to the narrow strip of yard behind her apartment building, dug a deep hole, and buried her grandfather.
Way Down
When Liz got home, she found Eric flinging books out the window. He had a stack of them by his feet and, though he threw them one at a time, there was nothing ceremonial about it.
He said,”hello” and asked if the worn copy of The Fellowship of the Ring was hers. He said he couldn’t remember.
She set her work things on the table and went into the bedroom. The top two shelves on Eric’s bookcase were empty. Eight months ago, while Liz visited her parents for the weekend, Eric had rearranged everything. He’d paid particular attention to where the bookcases should go and how the books should be arranged so his favorites would be in easy reach of the bed.
Liz took off her shoes and rubbed her feet.
She picked a dozen books off the next shelf and carried them out to Eric, craddling them carefully in her arms. She added them to his stack.
“So what are you doing?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s not important,” said Eric, hefting a hardback thesaurus. “I just needed to do something poignant.”
Liz peered out the window. Six stories down the books were barely recognizable as books. They were just colorful rectangles on the pavement. A crowd had gathered and pointed up towards their window.
“Well, then shouldn’t you be throwing your paintings?” asked Liz.
“What paintings?” asked Eric.
Liz watched. Eric looked distracted. It was the same look he had when he took out the garbage or watched the news or rode the subway or met someone for the first time. It said: I’m too busy for this.
“Do you want a glass of wine?” asked Liz.
“Yeah, wine would be good.”
“Not for throwing.”
“Oh. Never mind.”
Eric lifted How to Draw What You See. He raised his arm back like a pitcher and sent it sailing.
Liz smiled. They flew magnificently: smooth and heavy as they rose, fluttering and desperate on the way down.
Different
“I should go,” said Diana. She watched the full moon out the window. It reflected in the puddles on the street.
The rain had stopped and the clouds had moved on. So much for weather reports. They predicted the storms would continue into the morning.
“Oh, Magic,” said Arthur. “Did you suddenly get shy?” He nuzzled the naked skin of Diana’s hip. She had prominent hip bones. Arthur had always found them sexy, especially when she wore low jeans. In the past week, he made a series of jokes about her hip cleavage.
Diana’s phone beeped. She removed herself from Arthur and searched under the bed for her bag. It was a text message from Assam: “Hey Di! I’m playing on Friday at Canal Bar. 11 PM. Want to come?”
Assam was a friend from college. The night before graduation the three of them had climbed over the fence at a farm near school. Their intent was to go cow tipping, but they couldn’t find any cows. Instead, they climbed trees and sang rowdy songs. The night ended with a drunken pact to remain friends forever.
Diana began redressing. She collected her clothes from the floor. “Assam’s band is playing on Friday. Want to go?”
“Yeah, I think I already told him I would,” said Arthur.
“Oh,” said Diana. She considered the shoe in her hand. “He didn’t ask you to invite me?”
“No,” said Arthur. “But I figured you’d take any excuse to go to a bar after pay day.” Diana bent to put on her shoes and Arthur ran his fingers along the back of her thigh. “You should stay, Magic. I’ll be lonely without you.”
Diana batted away Arthur’s hand. “Stop. That tickles.”
The television came on in the apartment next door.
Diana cocked her head to listen. “The rain didn’t slow them,” she said. She had never met the couple who lived next to Arthur, but every night at ten, someone arrived home and they would turn on an old sitcom with the volume too loud. Sometimes she could hear their laughter through the wall.
Two weeks ago, Arthur told Diana he was in love with her. Diana kissed him. It seemed like the right to do. She cared about him deeply. It was just before ten o’clock and, soon, they had a laugh track to accompany their love making.
“What do they do?” asked Diana and she nodded towards the wall.
“She’s a security guard or something. Says it’s the most boring thing in the world.”
“So she’s the one who arrives at ten every night?”
“Yeah. Well… actually, he passed away last week.”
Diana froze. “How did he die?”
“A heart attack, I think.”
Through the wall, a studio audience laughed uproariously. Diana felt suddenly sick. She sat on the bed.
“Are you okay, Magic?”
She didn’t answer, but rested her head in Arthur’s lap. Arthur ran his hand through her hair. She thought back to when they had first met and how Arthur always played with her hair while they watched movies.
“It should be different,” said Diana. She felt tears form in her eyes. She gripped the blanket tightly in her fists. She wanted to hoist herself up and scream. She wanted to hit Arthur. She wanted to kiss him and pound against the walls.
Instead, she just held on to the blanket and let Arthur play with her hair.
Orpheus Syndrome
Note: This is vaguely explicit.
The first thing I noticed was how spartan Mira’s room was. The walls were bare and the paint was peeling in the corners. A black sheet had been duct taped unceremoniously over the window.
I thought about making a joke. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” I could say. I didn’t.
“Close the door!” yelled Mira. She lay on her bed, kicking her legs towards the ceiling as she tugged her jeans off. Her shirt and bra were draped over some milk crates that were set up as an end table.
I went to the door. As I closed it, one of her roommates winked at me from the hallway. I tried to remember his name. Toby? Or was Toby the girl sleeping on the couch?
“A little help,” called Mira behind me. I turned around. In her struggle with them, she had turned her pants inside out and they dangled now from her feet like giant socks. Otherwise, she was quite naked.
I wanted to stare. She was beautiful, but it felt lecherous, voyeuristic to just stand there and stare at her. “Have you ever taken off your pants before?” I asked.
“Don’t make fun of me!” she said, waving her feet around in the air, desperately.
“You look like a little kid.” I sat down on the bed.
“Don’t make fun! I have a condition!” said Mira. She flopped her legs into my lap.
I untrapped one pant leg from her heel and tugged it off. “Are you from the city originally?” I asked.
“Not in the least.” She wiggled her toes at me in victory.
“I was born here,” I said. I freed her other foot and tossed her jeans onto the floor. “But I grew up in Michigan. That’s where my family’s all from, going back generations. Probably since they first came to the country.’
Mira ran her feet along my crotch and located my erection. I drew in my breath. “Hello there, stranger,” she said.
I blushed. I was reminded of the night I lost my virginity- how it felt like I was being tested. I ran my fingers along her calf and up, up her inner thigh. “So where are you from?” I asked.
“Ugh!” said Mira and she rolled her eyes as if the question were a bad joke. “No questions now.”
“Why?”
“I have a condition!” she said again. She pointed a lazy finger at me. “Your turn,” she said. “Strip.”
I untied my shoes. My lips were dry. I could feel my heart racing. “What’s the condition?”
Mira leaned over the edge of her bed and reached underneath. Her hair cascaded across the floor. “Orpheus Syndrome,” she said.
I set my shoes down and shucked my shirt. I wanted to ask what she meant. I didn’t.
“It means I can’t look back. It means I can’t talk about my past. Otherwise, I could turn into a pillar of salt.”
“I think you’re mixing up your stories there.”
“Maybe,” she said. She lifted a shoebox and ran a hand over it possessively. “It’s a curse. My family offended a gypsy woman.” She opened the box. It was laden with sex toys. She reached in and removed a condom. She set the condom on her milk crate table beside a small bottle of lube and a thin, pink vibrator.
I stood to remove my pants, but hesitated. “What did your family do?”
Mira fixed her gaze on me. She cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows. After a few seconds she spoke. “What do you want to know?”
I felt very exposed, interrogated. “I just don’t feel like I know you.”
She sat very straight upright and folded her hands daintily in her lap, hiding her sex. “What do you want to know?” she repeated in an even tone.
“Anything. Where are you from?”
She smiled without showing teeth. The smile seemed to hide her expression. I had no idea what she was thinking. “I’m from…” She paused and considered. “A tiny island in the Mediterranean… where I was raised by wolves.” She fluttered her eyelids.
“Be serious.”
“I’m always serious,” said Mira. “I don’t know if you know anything about wolves, but they are the only animal that can’t tell a lie.”
“There aren’t any wolves in the Mediterranean.”
Mira laughed and threw her head back. She squinted like she was reading words written on the ceiling. “They were flown in. It was a zoo.” She looked back at me with an expression that dared me to challenge her. “A secret zoo. My parents were biologists and they wanted to see what would happen if they threw me in a cage with man-eating wolves.”
I sat down on the bed. “Okay, if you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”
Her expression softened. “I like you. What do you need right now?”
I shrugged and didn’t say anything. I felt like there were things to be said.
Mira crawled across the bed and held out her hand to me. I set my own hand in it like I was apologizing. She brought my hand up to her mouth and kissed my fingers. It was gentle. She kissed each finger in turn and then dragged her lips lovingly across my knuckles. “Forget what brought me here. Right now I just want you.”
I leaned in and pressed my lips against hers. Our noses batted against each other. She kissed anxiously like I was about to run away from her. Her hands touched my sides and made me jump. They crawled across my back and kneaded my flesh.
As if letting out a great breath, I let Mira pull me on top of her. I tried to let myself go with the moment, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know her. I wanted to tell her my secrets. I wanted to explain how two months ago Lisa had told me things weren’t working out and how her things were gone from the apartment the next day. I felt like I was being dishonest with Mira. I felt like two months ago I’d been cheating on Mira with my girlfriend. I wanted to say these things, but Mira was nipping at the tendons in my neck, her chest was heaving against me and her pelvis was rocking rhythmically against my own, grinding me into her clitoris.
Mira brought her lips against the side of my face and took my earlobe between her teeth. “Would you go down on me?” she asked.
Silently, I raised myself up onto all fours and kissed her chin, kissed her neck, trailed kisses across her clavicle. When I reached her sternum, I noticed the mark. Thin, pale and maybe two inches long. A tiny depression in her skin. It surprised me. I looked up at Mira’s face, but her eyes were squeezed shut. She ran her fingers through my hair. “Kiss my scars,” she said in a way that made it sound not quite a question, not quite a command.
I looked down. There were more scars. They were all about the same size and about the same shape, unevenly spaced, like a series of dashes down her torso and down her abdomen. I leaned my face close and kissed the one on her sternum. Mira cooed and I knew she was smiling.
A Burt Original
Danny sat on the shore outside his grandfather’s house and stared across the lake. The sun was setting. Or maybe rising. Whichever it was, it was bright and orange above the treeline and cast an amber glow over the water. Danny had given up smoking when he was 20, but he found himself now with a cigarette in his hand. He always smoked in his dreams.
Burt reclined on the shore beside Danny.
“Your fur’s going to get dirty,” said Danny. Burt’s fur was thick and orange like a shag carpet.
“Eh,” said Burt. “It’s not like I’ve got anyone to impress.”
Danny liked to describe Burt as looking like a reject muppet. When Danny was eight, Burt had been an imposing figure, impossibly tall at six feet, six inches. Danny had lived in terror of Burt’s long, red claws. But now Danny stood at a spindly six feet two inches himself.
“What am I doing at grandpa’s?” Danny threw his cigarette out into the lake. Fish swarmed to investigate as it sank.
“Remembering things, I’d assume. I don’t know, I just work here,” said Burt.
“I used to find you so frightening.”
“Yeah, those were the days.” Burt lay back and stretched himself out in the sand. “Remember the first time I came out of your closet? I think you peed yourself.”
Danny thought back. He could picture Burt appearing at the window and crawling out from the space under his bed. He remembered sleeping with a bat under his pillow. He could remember wetting the bed in some kind of early, almost-wet dream when he imagined Cindy Christopher chasing him at recess. But he couldn’t picture Burt in his closet.
“Yeah, Burt, you were something,” said Danny. He watched the sun. It had positioned itself perfectly as if sitting on the horizon and didn’t seem to have any intentions to move up or down in the sky.
Burt waved his arms and legs, making angels in the sand. Burt said, “I was nervous that first night. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but I’d never been in a nightmare before yours.”
Danny tried to listen, but he was still thinking about Cindy. Her body had treated puberty like it was a race. He hadn’t recognized her on the first day of fifth grade. She was like a woman disguising herself in kids’ clothes. He spent months hiding his first erections and assuming she had become cold before he’d said a word to her. She was eager to have a friend again.
A few months later, she’d broken his heart when she told him, with great enthusiasm, about her first kiss with one of her older brother’s friends, Frank. She asked him earnestly if that meant Frank was her boyfriend. Frank gave Danny his first cigarette.
“I always expected you to run away. I had practiced knocking down doors and stomping on staircases to scare you, but you just pulled the covers over your head and whimpered. And what could I do then? Nothing! I could eat you, but that doesn’t work. That’s just boring. So I circled around your bed and made growling noises.” Burt sat up and shook the sand from his fur like a dog. “I was ridiculously embarrassed.”
“Really?” asked Danny.
“Oh, yeah. It wasn’t until I started with the whispering that anything made sense.”
“I remember the whispering.” Danny stood and stretched him arms wide. He considered his grandfather’s house. The paint was peeling and looked abandoned. He wondered what this dream could be about. “It was always kinda cheesy.”
“What?!” Burt’s big eyes bulged.
“I assumed I’d gotten that from a movie. Maybe, that one with the ghosts living in the TV.”
“No, that was a Burt original. I’ve used that hundreds of times since then. You’re telling me it didn’t scare you?”
Danny shrugged. He checked his pockets to see if he had anymore dream cigarettes.
“I always thought you had just learned to stand up to me. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
Danny didn’t look at Burt. He felt suddenly restless. There was a breeze now and it tossed leaves from the trees. “Let’s check out my grandfather’s house.” He was about to add,”I want to get this dream on with,” but Danny really didn’t want to hurt Burt’s feelings any more.
“Yeah, okay,” said Burt and got to his feet.
Danny put his hand on Burt’s furry face. “You were my best friend.” Burt smiled. Danny smiled back and wished he meant it.
