Christmas Trees at Dawn

The children finally fell asleep. The parents tip-toed to the closet,
unlocked the presents and positioned them under the tree with its
delicate glass balls and constellations of colored lights. Alongside it the
window framed the big oak in the garde n with the children’s swing.
Faint stars shone between the black branches. No danger of a white
Christmas, the children’s wish. The children thought in terms of
snowmen, not of fatal skids. The parents finished the second bottle of
champagne and went, unsteadily, to bed.

The wind woke them briefly at 2:36. At 3:18 he mumbled: “Blowing
hard.” At dawn the house shook them stark awake. In the grey light
outside they saw that the big oak with the swing had fallen a few yards
from the house, a chaos of broken branches. The gale blowing a few
degrees more south-west and the tree would have swivelled on its taproot
like a fair-ground wheel of fortune and sent its tons on the roof.
Decapitated pines cowered and whined. The house groaned. The noise
almost covered the boy’s wails.

They groped their way toward the wails, she crying, “It’s all right,
everything’s all right, we’re here.”

In the living room the tree stood unlighted but intact, the colored balls
reflecting minimized versions of the chaos outside. Busy with their
presents the children didn’t look up. The boy had gone impatiently from
package to package, in a welter of gay gift wrapping paper and was now
pushing the fire engine, imitating its wail. The little girl had stopped at
the first package and had already set up the doll’s house. She positioned
the fourth chair at the table in the miniature living room: perfect order.

- Howard Waldman 

*This piece originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Twisted Tongue.

The Man in the Bowl

We were in Rocky Point smoking rocks when Morgan jumped from the balcony. He
had this perfect running start from atop the bed and his inertia was enough so that all we
could salvage was his Hawaiian shirt. I clutched that cotton in my fist for hours. His
summersault was faultless, and he was smiling. Two seconds into his heroic leap, his skull
smashed against the sand-strewn concrete beside the ATV rental palapa. Being sunrise,
the blood was dripping tangerine and purple toward the beach and a crowd of
expressionless Mexicans huddled around the corpse.

¨Pinche pendejo güey!¨ locals said.

The policía paraded us through the streets. It was beautiful. Morgan with his head
cracked like a huevo ranchero, seasoned with ethereal leisure. Nobody said anything as
they picked up the chunks. Then they beat us piñata style, with bloody batons, until we
were handcuffed, wrestled into the backseat of a decrepit chariot next to a man who has
been arrested for doing cocaine in a cantina. Continue Reading »

Papy on the River

“It’s summer again, Papy,” we yelled in his ear. “Where to this time?”

Every June 21, his birthday, it was the same thing. Most of the time
we didn’t get through or when we did we couldn’t understand him and
we’d wheel him around the park, telling him what the flowers and the
sky looked like.

This time he said “B-bordel” and we laughed and poked him, very
gently, and yelled, “Where else do you want to go, Papy?” After a
while he said, “C-craix. B-boat.” He used to talk about it years ago
when he could still talk: young, stripped to the waist in the sunshine,
drifting past nice things. That was way back, before the war.

So we placed him in a rowboat at Craix. He sat between us, bundled
up, blinking behind his thick useless glasses. He looked happy as the
boat drifted, along with belly-up breams, oil-slicks and plastic bags,
past cement-works, scrap-heaps and run-down council houses. We
yelled at him the things we remembered from his memories: banks
bristling with fishing poles, wheat fields with poppies, neat kitchen
gardens, couples dancing in the riverside café under the garlands. The
blue sky was no invention. He kept saying, “N-nice, n-nice.”

We brought him back to the Home. We yelled in his ear, “Enjoy
yourself, Papy?” He processed it and said, “N-nice, n-nice g-girls, nnice,
n-nice g-girls.” Drifting down the river he hadn’t heard us. He’d
been to the bordel after all. Maybe we should have taken him there for
real. The girls are renewed, not like the river. But I guess outside
things don’t matter much if you can’t see them and if you’re able to
hold on to the way they’d been.

Note: This piece originally appeared in the July 2006 issue of Gold Dust

- Howard Waldman