Category: creative writing

Two-Faced God

La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.

― Charles Baudelaire

The month is named for the Roman two-faced god Janus who looks back while looking forward. At the turning of a New Year’s Day, some recount the disappointments and triumphs of the year now past before turning to declare resolutions for the new year to come. Janus is a two-faced god overlooking the port before embarking, where past is present as prolog and the future ahead is still merely a damask curtain rising before an unknown scene.

It rained yesterday; I call it rain in all sincerity and respect, some two inches of water to wash away the pockmarked snow and the grit from the sanded streets. January is the realm of Capricorn, another creature of duality with the tail of a fish and the body of a goat. Capricorn climbs out from the depths of the stormy sea up the stony mountain. The remnants of the holiday cakes are crumbled on the hill for the crows to feast.

When my black leather jacket was stolen in Portland, I was bereft and enraged. I saved money for a new one, a better one. I tried on different styles for size and finally ordered a moto-style jacket with tough brass zippers from the kink shop on SE Belmont. When the jacket arrived, the owner called me to come pick it up. He asked me out to dinner, but I was entangled. “You can’t get enough of what you don’t want,” he told me. I think about what he said when asked what resolutions I’ve made for the New Year.

I still have the jacket.

Trolls and Bridges

Under_bridge

When campus clears out after fall term finals, I travel down to the university bookstore on the busy corner with the tavern across one street, the bus terminal across the other. It’s a three-story building with a take-away cantina and clothing franchise selling mascot-branded t-shirts, hoodies, and Mardi Gras beads on the ground floor. In the back are a greeting cards and novelty gifts such as college students might give each other. The upper floor carries textbooks, if those are still used in class anymore, the last sad calendars, and a few books by notable faculty. It’s not much of a bookstore anymore.

I turn left down the stairs to the basement.

The ceiling is low and the fluorescent lights glare a little too close over the shoulder. There is a vague aroma of copper and dust lingering on the last step. There is color and texture here in this silo hidden from the rest of the city in the depths of inks and oils. This is the art supply section for the earnest and ragged fringe of an educational corporation exalting in its athletes and MBA candidates. It’s probably the same on every campus. After finals, the floor is nearly empty except for the work-study student clerk.

There are inks here, pens with fine and ultra-fine tips, with caps or clickers to test the line on a notepad. There are Crayola watercolor pencils, pastels, sleeks sets of charcoals. I buy packs of blank hemp-paper cards with matching envelopes that serve for all occasions; I draw an image, scrawl a message, and attach sprigs of rosemary with tiny red clothespins to the face. I need a silver Sharpie, a metal ruler, and more tiny red clothespins.

There are sheaves of handmade papers embossed with gold fans and silver wings. There is tangible tactility in the fibers of hand-bound empty books–here a pressed pansy or a whisper of dragonfly wing pressed between pages. I like to give these beautiful empty books away as gifts. There is implied within a promise of mystery and movement, some curving journey into or out of the labyrinth. These empty books remain beautiful stacked on a dusty coffee shelf despite remaining unmarked by a searching hand. Trolls wait, perhaps, in the encounter with the blank page. Do we give the gifts we want, or the gifts we want for others?

[Memo to self: begin assembling the box of secrets my son swore to burn in a bonfire when I die.]

Soft Horizons

 

knitting_basket

There is a world of plant and animal to twist into fiber: comb bamboo, gather the underbelly tufts from an Arctic Ox to spin into light thread, stroke away the hair of a rabbit and knit. The cottonwood wisps of spring would make fine garments. The harvest of fibers does no harm to any living creature, except perhaps the cut bamboo cane. Yarn tells its story through the fingers of women.

The shop is closing, the one on the ground floor of an old house bordering campus. It is painted soft green with a deep porch wrapping around the front overlooking rose bushes. Inside the small rooms were shelves spilling over with merino, silk, and wool in all colors and none. An antique oak table in what was once a dining room hosted knitting classes. I came to learn late in life, but my beginner’s class was canceled. Not to be dissuaded. I taught myself to knit watching videos on the internet. Long-tail cast-on, yarn over, purl, make two-together, cast off—a coded language of loops and knots akin to conjuring.

Angora is coaxed from contented hares and spun around a core of silk thread. Cashmere comes from the belly hair of goats. Alpaca is strong and warm and soft. I abandoned my needles for many seasons. Projects languished in baskets and paper bags, which often happens in summer until they’re taken up again at Samhain when the days grow dark. I left much undone.

I sat at the table for a day with a mill-end ball of wool and cast-on a thousand stitches and ripped them out again. I knitted and purled a dozen rows, binding off but for the last stitch and ripped it out again. Join in the round, left slanting decrease, each knot recalled in the hand. I unraveled the unfinished cowl and wound it up again. In the telling of the yarn, nothing is ever lost.

Dragon’s Tail

chandelier2

It’s the dark of the moon. There is no reflected light on the lunar face, so near is the moon to the sun approaching a new cycle. New moon arrives before midnight tomorrow here on the west coast, a partial solar eclipse conjoining the headless serpent’s tail.

Is it Karma, you ask, this purging new moon?

Perhaps. It is certainly mystery, detachment, and otherworldly desire.

When I called the nurse to describe my symptoms–growing fever, headache from a sledge hammer to the back of my head, weakness and fire in my joints–it was as I feared. She confirmed I was coming down with the same pox from which my young son recently recovered. If you become deranged or out of your mind, she said, you will need to be hospitalized. You are old. It’s the fever. It will infect your brain. Encephalitis. I was 32 years old.

I called my mother to ask if I ever had chicken pox. She recalled measles, but demurred on the pox. It’s only chicken pox, which sounds light and frivolous and cowardly, contracted a few months before vaccines became widely available. I called my son’s father to come take him before I sank under the fever sea and rode the foam.

There’s a pox scar atop my third eye.

Dragon’s Head

 

Dragons are ravenous.

The duration of the full moon lunar eclipse visible in North America will be the longest in 580 years. The eclipse will last 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds. Although it’s not a total eclipse, the earth’s shadow will obscure ~98% of the lunar surface.

Shadows fall.

Eclipses come in pairs, usually twice each year and sometimes more, at new moon and full moon. An eclipse occurs when the new or full moon is within 15 degrees of the lunar nodes. The moon’s nodes are calculated points where the moon’s orbital path crosses the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the Sun’s apparent yearly path over the earth. There are two nodes: one rising to the north; one descending to the south.

The north node is the Dragon’s Head, called Rahu in Vedic astrology. The south node is the Dragon’s Tail, called Ketu. Some consider the north node to be the place to confront Destiny, while the south is an encounter with Karma.

The full moon occurs early in the morning of November 19th in the States. The earth will block most of the solar light from reflecting silver off the moon’s surface. Rather, the face of the moon will turn dusky and red illuminated only by bending solar rays that still reach its surface. A blood moon.

The Dragon needs feeding.

November & NaNoWriMo

gourdsIt’s November and National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again. Sigh.

Write 50K words in 30 days. That works out to 1667 words per day, even on weekends, holidays, elections, and when the power goes out. To all those participating in Nanowrimo, I salute you.

I signed up on October 30, 2016, for my first Nano, having learned about the nonprofit event just that day. I secretly believed it was the quick-start kick-start I needed to launch my next brilliant career as a novelist.I completed the challenge twice, finishing one novel and getting 60k words written on the second.

After much revision and many drafts several years later, I published the first novel, Pandora’s Last Gift, in July. (Thanks to all who bought or read the book!)

Now I’m back to Nano to finish the second novel. Rather than being a love story, it’s dark fantasy  this time titled Nocturne: Three Dog Night:

“When a sheep rancher is killed, suspicion falls on rescued dogs belonging to neighbor Sammi Crow Feather. To protect her innocent dogs from being blamed for the carnage and destroyed, seventeen year-old Sammi flees with them over the mountains into the desert, headed to remote territory in northeastern Oregon. As Sammi desperately tries to elude the state police and forensic biologist pursuing her, she is followed by the otherworldly beast spreading carnage and his omnipotent master. Sammi must fight for her own life, as well as the lives of her dogs against both human and dark immortal forces.”

Third time is a charm.

Threading the Needle

sewing_machine

The hand remembers when the mind falters. There is memory in movement, a silent somatic wisdom of the body. The hand remembers, the clever thumb and forefinger working in concert to rediscover skill lost to thought, remember how to wind the thread from spool to spindle, how to wind the bobbin and how to seat it.

Clear the writing table of paper, books, and pens, the bits of candle and boxes of watercolor pencils; the kitchen’s trestle table is cluttered with the season’s last tomatoes spread to ripen, the final few summer squash, and turkey quills–there is no room for mending upstairs.

Do others still mend the straining seam or torn placket? Or do they simply fold the flawed clothing and stack it in a paper bag to donate or discard in the trash? Once it was expensive to purchase clothing, when Levi’s jeans were still sewn in San Francisco and the going wage was $2.30 per hour for scooping ice cream at the 31 flavors. There was no internet or Amazon, of course, offering instant comparison pricing and stinging reviews. There were department stores downtown, and more being built at the malls, or the Sears catalog to buy clothing. There were fabric stores as large as a warehouse with rainbow shelves of thread and offering charming selections of notions displayed on sprawling racks.

It was my grandmother’s sewing machine, a portable Singer stowed in a thick black case. Its features include the ability to sew both forward and backward. When Grandma died, my eldest cousin Kathy claimed the sewing machine, despite owning a deluxe zig-zag cabinet model Singer of her own.  But Mom said “No,” and had the machine fitted with a new motor. She gave it to me. I’ve carried it across the country and back, through many household moves, and now she rests in a black lacquered cupboard of her own.

pucker_patches

To my mother’s eternal frustration and consternation, I refused to thumb through the pattern catalogs in the fabric store and select a Butterick pattern for a sewing project. I had designs of my own. 

I found a lovely book about patternless sewing in the school library. I stole it. (Delighted to report that this same book is still apparently in print: Son of Hassle-Free Sewing: Further Adventures in Homemade Clothes by the authors of The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book, available on Amazon, of course.) I laid out printed cotton tapestries imported from India and fashioned long dashing coat-dresses  with high smocked sleeves and fastened with a matching cummerbund. I bought remnants fabric ends and devised patchwork tiered skirts and vests of puckered patches. 

As time went on, I returned the stolen book to the library. I sewed less often, finding it harder to thread the tiny eye of the needle when I did. My last project was a quilted cushion for the firewood box and the results were disappointing somehow. I took up knitting, which is really just tying many interconnecting knots and threading nothing.

When I finally took out my sewing machine to dispatch with mending, I wondered if the little light bulb above the presser foot would still burn, if I would still be able to thread the needle. The hand remembers; the light still burned.

I discovered the silk my grandmother brought me from Hong Kong long ago, still folded next to the machine, all whole liquid blue and silver, never cut.

silk

Last Orders

bumble_artichoke

I remember rain.

Wildfire smoke is pushed by a high-pressure bellows to the east, dispersed again when the wind changes to pull marine flow from the Pacific. The grass crunches underfoot; the hill is a tangled warren of burrs and foxtail, all things sere and seeding. Weary of drought and heat, wonder at the prodigious flooding in the east, scanning the sky for rain before the west is ash and withered bone. The cracks in the earth grow wider.

Birch and locus leaves float on the surface of the scrying bowls clouded with wasps. A fresh pail of water set out on the hillside every day during these three months of drought for birds and wild night creatures is drained or toppled by morning. At first, while a trickle of water remained in the creek, they eschewed the metal bucket. Now they depend upon it.

The garden presses to her longed-for languishment and release. The grapes are ripe. The tomatoes sigh and sag under a harvest of Romas, Brandywines, and Sungolds.

tomatoes

The zucchini, the courgette, the green summer squash the Greeks call kolokithia, now dominates the terraced beds and relentlessly births thick heavy fruit. Somehow, through camouflage or inattention, great squash clubs grow overnight. With their large seeds muffled in pulp, these giants are useful only as filling for nut bread, fritters, muffins, or pita. Shred the flesh against the box grater and squeeze out the water between two cotton kitchen cloths while resolving to pick the smaller squash before they transform.

shredded_zucchini

At least the flesh is mild, versatile, and forgiving–

A zucchini cake filled with crushed pineapple and coconut, finished with a buttermilk glaze; oatmeal muffins studded with blueberries, kolokithia scraped and broiled stuffed with tomatoes, feta, and breadcrumbs; slices layered with potato, onion, and tomatoes, bathed in olive oil and baked into Briam; stewed with fresh bay leaves, eggplant, tomatoes, and olives to eat on crusty bread; sautéed in a frittata sprinkled with goat cheese and topped with yet more tomato.

Hungry for a change of season, I remember rain.

frittata_zuc

Threshold

low_water

Like Shrek with his gourd green head, this thirteen-pound watermelon watered by the Columbia River, ripened outside Hermiston, was trucked west to the valley to be sliced open with a wide sharp blade; it’s bigger than a man’s head, this, the size of an ogre’s, rich in sticky red juice flooding the sluice etched into the cutting board.

Hum-sing the theme chorus “Accidentally in Love” from the second Shrek film, cube the flesh, and suck the nectar from the board. Come on, come on/Turn a little faster-

The first dangerous slice along the scalp steadies the rocking. Then carving rind shells away along the broad curve until the melon is flayed raw and crimson. Come on, come on/The world will follow after-

This is nature’s Gatorade, this sweet pink water. Chop the rind to set out on the hill for the doe still nursing spotted twin fawns. The rind is nearly gone by morning, gone by evening. Come on, come on/’Cause everybody’s after love.

Drought and wildfire, smoke and thunder, cracked earth and dying trees: Only the moon can bring rain, and who can rule her?

There are thresholds before and after, an Old English word with Norse roots. A threshold defines the barrier or bar used to contain the threshed matter lining dirt floored cottages, a boundary to keep the reeds dry within. Some thresholds are as visible as the plank or stone that lies under the door. Others are unnoticed, until they are crossed.