Belisama

Jack walks back in the trailer with a little box of gentle blue; larger than your usual eggs, richer too, he says. Says hen's eggs are for any old farming domesticate no matter how freckled brown and soul-wholesome they look, but the duck egg is reserved for the true children of the wilderness. Magical dawn-blue shells. I remember hearing once that folks in the middle ages would smash up their eggshells to powder 'cause otherwise witches take them and sail away. Mighty small witches they got in those parts, I remember thinking, and then I remembered Baba Yaga; fierce initiator of the Slavs riding through wolfish pine-needle teeth in her mortar and figured witches can be any damn size they want.

'You want eggs, Boo?' Jack calls out real gentle 'cause Boo was deep in her colouring and you didn't want to disturb that beautiful bubble expanding around her head like a halo of blown glass. Strawberry field girl, smile like a new moon. Jars of meadow flowers all around her little altar of personal peace; arterial spray poppies and cornflowers and the dandelion heads ready to Cinderella into a thousand wishes at midnight.

I'm busy stitching up a sleeve torn up bad on barbed wire. Red and blue checked squares sacrificed to sweet corn we browned up on the grill, watching Boo while Jack is cooing china blue babies out of his feral harem by the pond. She don't need an eye on her all the time as such, but sometimes she breaks the chain of her long dreaming and lifts up her contradictory body to go dancing by the river, and Jack's blood goes cold every time because she can't swim and the river means she is in a sad place. Sometimes she is up a tree and he hums to himself gettin' his hands in the greening vegetable soil of their patch because his girl is making a nest up there; talking to birds he'll never know the names of. The sky means she's happy as a woman can be trapped in the changeling baby brain of an old car accident that scythed her mind away.

Even her hair is a dandelion. So soft and corn-blonde wispy, like a breath would blow it clean away from her skull in Rumpelstiltskin reels of spinning gold, leaving just that valley of indented flesh where they took the smoking pieces out. She wears white dresses stained at the hem with smudges of bleeding grass, and no other colour. Jack finds careless summer shifts at the thrift, shed like snakeskin by girls ripening into autumn and buys them for her, armfuls of calm, cloud white.

'These are some coin of the realm,' I say, my mouth still working at the yolk explosion, my mind on Boo and soft colours of duck egg and cotton worn thin by limbs tumbling in sunlight. The eggs are lavish protein and I listen to the weary cells of my morning body say grace. Hallelujah.

Jack places a plate of eggs by Boo, her wrist is a swan's neck nodding over the paper for all ages to colour in by number. He jerks his head towards the door and I follow him with thread dangling off my arm into a sun slipping off the noose of early morning; roaring off the sides of the trailer, frying the grasses dry. We sit by the ashes of the night's fire and Jack twists the heavy metal ring he forged himself for their wedding round and round his finger.

'She's a little funny about food right now, can't tolerate a lot, but she loves the eggs.'

I have some vision of Boo pushing away plates of anything that ain't white and yellow. Anything that isn't her pale tranquiliser or her lover in the sky. Belisama, Jack calls her now, the wife of some old Celtic sun god; the Fair Shining One. He breathes in and looks hard at the ground and I get one of those psychic little earthquakes in me like I'm a rat or dog about to flee the streets.

'Good for the baby, duck eggs,' he says.

I go dead-sand hourglass still, like the whole of my being has to be suspended for this telegram to be pressed into my hand. Suddenly I've got a black hole where my mouth used to be so I decide to see how much matter it sucks in.

'You think I'm sick, huh?'

I think of Boo, half-brained honey-sweet thing, swelling like one of her dandelion heads. I think of her transcendent nun's face, and the heft of Jack's body that two seconds ago was as dickless as some tonsured novice. Thought that was how they lived. Thought they lay together in their doll's house trailer like smooth peg dolls, if I thought about it at all.

'It wasn't...like how you're thinking.'

'You don't know what I'm thinking.' Twisting the red thread hanging from my sleeve over in my fingers like I'm plaiting a thin dribble of blood.

'No, I do, see, I know what anyone who sees her would be thinking. But it wasn't like that.' He picks up a half-burned stick, pokes the ashes. 'She'd come down from one of her trees, and she was singing. She pushed her dress up and smiled at me, and her face, Natty,' he looks up at me then and his eyes are wet watercolour hazel. 'Her face was like...like a star had fallen to earth. She was so happy.' He stares off toward the riverbank, where the sadness lived. 'So happy.'

'Baby?'

Behind us there is a vague angel, weightless in prairie cotton, and Jack rises from that circle of sour and dead fire and holds her 'cause Boo just wants to reassure herself there is one solid thing left her in the world. And then I know where the grey pieces of that surgical valley went; to the hands of a man who molded them like butter, heart-shaped.


Written by: Natty Mancini
Photograph by: Karen Zhu

Clocks

Walt was used to his mother’s itinerant habits. For the greater part of his childhood, he accompanied her as an additional bit of luggage. She was a devoted traveler – her sordid past, her illiteracy, and her general lack of an education were no barrier. She worked only enough to finance her next excursion. Each journey was more ambitious than the last, which made it more and more difficult for Walt to be a part of them. By the time his mother decided that she wanted to make a pilgrimage to a Buddhist temple in Tibet, he had long ceased to be her traveling companion.

But she always sent postcards, at least once a month, with messages scrawled in the shaky handwriting of someone who had learned to write late in life.

I met Walt almost five years ago now and we became fast friends. I was a young professor, eager to make a positive impression on the faculty. I spent my days in the university library, hoping to pad my academic credentials with research publications. Walt worked in the library re-shelving books, but his menial job was a poor reflection of his intelligence. He was brilliant and became the unofficial co-author of several of my articles. He was never afforded a formal education, but his mother always made sure there was a small library of books for him to read wherever they went. In India, he read translated buddhavacana, Siddhartha, and Rushdie. In Central America, he read Neruda, Garcia Marquez, and Cortazar. An education, she told him, was the key to a life she never had but always wanted. Walt was never sure what kind of life she meant by that.

Sometime in late August, Walt came to me at my usual carrel and slid a postcard towards me. “Algiers” was transposed in bright yellow text across an image of a coastal city. On the back, it read: “This is my view. Isn’t it beautiful? Egypt next?

“I have to find her.” Walt whispered.

“What do you mean?” I whispered back.

“My mother sent that six months ago. She never goes more than a few weeks without sending me a postcard. Something’s happened. I need to make sure she’s okay. I’m flying out tomorrow.”

“You’re going to try and find her? You can’t go over there now. It’s a mess.” I said in shock, still whispering. “Did she make it to Egypt? Where will you even start?”

“I’m flying into San Javier. Hopefully, I can pay my way onto a fishing vessel to Algiers from there. I’m going to start at the last place I know she was for sure.” He tapped his finger loudly on the postcard.

“Listen Walt, your mother is a seasoned globetrotter. I’m sure she’s been in trouble before, but she always finds her way home. You don’t even know that she’s in any trouble at all.”

“You don’t understand. Sure, she’s well-traveled, very well-traveled. But she's a dandelion puff. Her wanderlust is like a wind that carries her to these faraway places. At the end of the day it's my job to gather up all the little pieces to try and make her whole again, but it’s impossible. She's left part of herself in every one of the cities and towns she finds herself in. The irony is that she thinks of her journeys as a means to self-realization, to find herself. Yet, she loses more and more of herself each time she comes home. And she knows that. She knows that I know that, and she sends the postcards as a reassurance for my sake, as a sign that she hasn’t completely fallen apart.”

Walt was intent. All I could do was ask him to keep in touch, to let me know he was okay. Almost a full month later, I received a letter from him. He had arrived in Algiers safely and managed to find the small residential building his mother had stayed in.

“In spite of everything that’s happened in North Africa,” he wrote, “my mother was right. It’s beautiful here. The city is enchanting. The people are angry, but optimistic. And life goes on. My mother’s living quarters are Spartan, little more than a bed. The wallpaper is curling from the walls and the hardwood floor is rotting. I woke this morning to a breeze that brought in with it the acrid smell of the Bay, but it was refreshing anyway given the otherwise stagnant air of the room. As I lay in bed, listening to the sounds of routine as the fishermen prepped their boats by the marina, I realized that I could be content settling here. I also realized that that was a sentiment my mother never had the benefit of feeling herself. The landlord said my mother left several months ago. I’m not sure how I will find out where she’s gone.”

I wrote back, glibly sharing the banalities of my days and asking when he would return.

“When I find her,” he replied. I didn’t want to explore the possibility that that may never come to pass.

I didn’t hear from Walt for several months after that. Near the end of the term, I received a postcard from him. The picture was of the Great Pyramids and was sent in an envelope with some photographs he had taken. There was one of young children playing soccer in a sandlot, several candid portraits of Egyptian men and women, and one of him in front of a vibrant marketplace. He was smiling.

There was a short message on the back of the postcard. “She made it to Egypt, but left before the riots. I’m told she may have made her way back east, through Algeria. Tunisia next?”

That was the last I heard from Walt. In the years that have since passed, I realized that the irony of his mother’s life was an irony of self-preservation. We’re all just trying to live and to leave something behind before we die.

Written by: Sam Chow
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe