Red

The red cinnamon outside burned my insides like I had stuffed a ladle of it in my mouth. So red and brown, it burned. Red tall building of twenty floors, melting into the earth in boiling splutters that pop and sprinkle the street below in hot etches. What with the ashen circles of smoke flying out a window or two, every floor or two, 201 Maple made its own little brush-stroke clouds that regularly put a resident or two into expensive chemo. The red heat whirred through the blades of Mrs. Matthews’ table fan and dried the trickle of sweat down her Syrian-Catholic nose into salt. The salt on the Malabar coast that cured the morning’s catch of fish and ate hot into its insides until there was nothing but salty deliciousness when bitten into with her stainless steel box of big fat red rice and watery buttermilk. Nothing remained, except the buttermilk, which she took a sip into and grimaced and blamed American cows.

When she and Theodore came to 201 Maple, they felt like they were being ushered into a big red candle. Waxy inside out, that they were slipping as they walked up the cheap red carpet into the Chief Nurse’s office. “Welcome to your new home!” she said, warmly. Almost too warm.

And then Theodore melted with the insides. “Why is he so red?” quipped another resident in her cancerous halo and coughed into his coffin. He lay simple and sweating. The aides that had carried him every morning by his murky underarms into his bi-weekly hot shower, now carried him out, suited and hot, taking care not to step into the boiling tar below that flowed a sticky red and sealed a centimeter or two to the bottom of their shoes. Rachel wasn’t there – she sipped on her glass of buttermilk, seeped in asafetida as she ran her fingers through her white hair.

Mrs. Matthews stepped into the melting carpet, and tip-toed to her dresser. She opened the drawer, second from the bottom. And there it was, a scruffy brown coconut, the husk burning in the heat, a little black. And through a wound in its hirsute husk, rose two green leaves, like Theodore’s words. She put it back and closed it shut and melted a little.

Mr. Du Bois' Plants

Plants don’t grow as much as they did back in my days. My days were those that weren’t yours. They are so back in time that they are now jealous backbenchers. For when my plants grew, they plucked tiny bits of my heart as I did when they were grown and fruity and beautiful. Simple fruits. For when water was the most affluent Christmas gift I could purchase as an employer that employed people that settled for affordable nothings and absences as gifts, I gave them my every bit of simplicity. And as sate little puppies, they out-nerved their tails, stair-casing every bit of themselves, en route up, towards the bit of sun I could offer them through my divided bars of sun.

The sun wasn’t a commodity. He was a welcome gift. For as bad at math as I was, I could not fulfill my efforts at organization into tracking my days here. Simply, days went by. Like countless eye-lash come-togethers. And when hopes of giving up were high, reigning drugs, flirting men and women, delectable apples, I shut my senses to everything remotely reminiscent. Ghosts as they are and were, my memories never let go. They haunted. Like Enyd Blytons.

One day, I thudded my shovel into the ground and drew first blood. Along came the fuzzy roots, dangling cotton candies in the air; I licked them invisible and the impossible sugar still stung.

Like bees. Bees that were versatile enough for an entire garden into a bottle of bear-indulgent honey.

Thud thud.

I took them all out and sprung about the snow in sweaty surprise and a song.

They’ll come back when the snow is gone. I hope.

--

Plants don’t grow as much as they did back in my days. My days were those that weren’t yours; as backbenchers, we all lied about our home-works while secretly picking the reddest cherry for then-sweethearts.

Felicity

With every cracking of a can, comes a swathe of emotions, ranging from curiosity, hunger, primordial urges, laziness, and joy. Occasionally, disgust, and revenge, at something unwanted or untimely. Instinctively, it was but a shell that kept Felicity away from dinner. So while the distant metallic crackle rings like a soup kitchen bell, something stirs overhead.

Sacrificial cymbals down the stairs, like an unfortunate old man’s tumble. At the edge of the stairs, she waits for her prey to come to her. A little spider lady for her overfed prospective spouse. Eager eyes and the in and out of her finger nails gouge the air until it falls limp to but a last-second balloon exhale. Phhhbrrroeeey.

Silences are two-faced; farts in a crowded street or in a two-person elevator. In unbroken silence, Felicity toes on all fours, seemingly unseen, under the couch, behind my legs. The twitch of her whiskers brush and paint a fresh tickle against the Achilles in my right foot. I fell in love with an icy nose and emery tongue, as she gnaws my fingers and smells the semi-open dinner. Tuna.

Pickily, she walks away, like the fish died for nothing, as I slice up some blood on my thumb while opening the can. In a lazy flop, the can of unctuous flaked fish falls shaped like the can’s inside onto Felicity’s saucer, wafting away in her unnoticed smells.

And every time I enter my home, I smell it. Ready and generous. And every time, there seems to be a little nibbled and missing. In secrecy.

--

For Hobbes

Yeti

When a yeti sweats, it wicks the ends attached to his scalp first. Growing towards the ends in little journey surges, already evaporating by the time they reach the edges. Poof. Beaten and a wet lion, Haaga stretches the nails of his chair until they sag and yet hold its splinters together. He stares past his humid and matted bangs into the darkness. A shadow walks in, smelling of tobacco in echoes, behind.

“Hungry are we?” snarls from the dark.

“I want my momma.”

A clap and the chair gives in, thumping Haaga onto the dusty floor that sticks to his long hair. The shadow gulps in his stand, tick-tocking his eyes, listening to the rustle of hair in the humid breezeless air. The smell of Haaga rustles by in hungry husky breaths.

Four thumps to the right neck, and the red tip of the cigarette flies in swirls to the floor. The shadow mingles with the remnant darkness. Sexed out.

Where does the wind waft in from, in a square-hole room with a single light bulb, swinging that way and this, misappropriating the cone of dirty light that came with it, widening his stolen but earned cigarette-smoke rings, and chilling his palm-hair that stand on ends? He singes a dozen white-gray strands off his beard in every draw, blowing more rings, and wishing he could jump through one of them and emerge clean and with size 9 feet.

He should have listened to his mother.

Dice

We watch the corners of his eyes, a little black game of tennis against the edges, as they make us want to cry. Half of my cattle, a third of my mother’s rubies. The brothers are broke to their careless loin-cloths; a shameful day to pick a windy verandah for a game. The lines on his palms have lost to the crackling-rubbing of his dice. He barters any remnant self respect for precision in one smooth whisper to probability; a thirty-sixth of my cattle to feed the gods, cackles he.

He tosses the dice to the board, as they thump the vicious snakes in their eyes; his bold golden kings nifty-catly climb ladders. Up and up, while my fingers burned, and palms frazzled, and my cowardly cowries snuck their tails in and roll down, snake-bitten-blue.

At least the alcohol is good and foreign. Ten thousand pipes, they say, from a distant land, where there were no hangovers, or rubies. At least not for a few thousand years more.

Sending word to the accountants, they flank my side in nightly servility, smelling of sleep and breast-milk, with rolls of paper-wealth, that they toss in the ring for the next round. Government and all.

Twelve minutes, each one for each face of a pair of dice. I lose it all, including my accountants, that are sent away with wishes to finish their paused women near, and a condom.

I think one of the beastly guards clobbered me on a bathroom break. Back on the floor, loin-cloth and all, I smile and throw up.

Did we know that his palms were the kings of chance, as we pawn our woman?

Radio Lady

When she celebrated her ten thousandth mile on a sunny fall evening, there was no one around but the crackled brown leaves, Elvis, and dusty wind. The pink bike squeaked and needed oil, unheeded for amidst the music. She stopped for a minute, looked around, set her rock-hard calves back on the pedals and sped, background scored.
She cried a hundred wind-swept tears, lining her cheeks in salty war-marks. Panting up the elevation, she rode. Gunshots in the air, half-dead geese plummeting faster than their plumes. Sunny, warm turtles drip back into the river, offended. The wind zzzed, plunging like chunks of wood between her tire-spokes. Rain felled monsters washed all, a hated, controversial water colour canvas.

Two blocks east of shelter, there was a little explosion. Blip. In an insignificant little bubble, the front tire fell and breathed off, dropping her at a friendly puddle swish swash. She reached for her Elvis machine love and shoved it into her bodice, hugged her bike and walked. The puddle in her sneakers.

The door slammed bam. And she stood in the doorway, the howling rain in her soaked gray hair, stapled to her head. She wheeled in, the front tire sagging liposucked, and felt for her heart, tapped the radio on its head until it swung back to life and doled out the Jailhouse Rock in baby vomits. She turned back to me and grinned.

“Ten thousand!”

Keys

Daymare. That forty thieves had had their way with my apartment. Funnier still, they hadn’t even had to chant a little jibber-jabber to enter. I had left the keys in the door. Snickering, the chief turns the knob counter-clockwise and lets them all in, one by one. They all look like they share a mother or a father and an evil grin. They run around the house, like noisy neighbor kids, chewing on wires, tripping the desks, strangling the lamps. And when they are done, they leave in a file, like order were so fucking necessary now.

I rub my eyes and pockets awake to check for my keys and sanity. Neither. I dash home.

The winds, a howling. Through the doors and windows and broken everything. A livewire buzzes in a corner, while doltish ladybugs lie fried beside it. The food’s all licked clean. Literally. I stand amid crinkled wrappers and opened cans and cracked Tupperware and feathery cushions and soiled sheets. In one gulp, the tears rush and burn.

The key’s still in the door, in the harmless clinking of the two bells, a lizard and a name tag that are attached to the keychain.

On second or rather the fifth thought, I turn around and bury my keys and hear them chunk into a growing-grown potato. Safer. Baked keys for dinner in a few weeks.

As dramatic as dreams, as I would like it to be, summers are not. Bleh.
No thieves, no broken stuff and no key dinners.