She visits the playground almost every day. A lone swing stirs, and she knows it for what it is: a sign from her son that he’s still here, maybe not so that she can touch skin-to-skin, maybe not so she can breathe in tuna fish, sweat, and red licorice, but not gone either.
Once the playground was a vibrant place, crammed full of parked strollers and bags of Cheerios. Her son darted from the swing set to the sandbox to the covered green plastic slide that curved into a sudden drop. The other children grew up, started driving, went to college or work. The new crop of parents, calling the playground a death trap, petitioned for a safer area for their children, a place away from the woods, a place with rounded edges and soft landings.…
Because I am a small person, olive-skinned, female and not old but not young, more senora than senorita, I am accepted in places white men my age are not. Not because I am blessed, mind, but because I do not matter much. I am invisible. I feel reasonably safe and secure here because it is no different from the neighborhoods I grew up in. Also, because I am walking a pit bull with fantastic teeth and lolling tongue, whom no one else knows to be a pussy cat, happy to lick the hand of anyone, good or bad, who holds out treats.
“Good dog,” I tell her, as we pass a gaggle of men and women holding court on the sidewalk. All are wearing masks, I am not.…
Of course, she would never smoke weed. Not at work at least. Nor did she vape. No. At work, she was more than content with classic Marlboro reds. Tobacco laws prohibited her from buying them herself, so she smoked them sparingly. She made sure to thoroughly enjoy every puff. She wasn’t addicted. Cigarettes were great but never a necessity. She didn’t crave the nicotine. She craved the silence.
Just being able to get away from the chaos of the store for five minutes was the whole reason she had started smoking. In an ironic twist, the cigarettes helped her remember to breathe. It was like a cancerous meditation. Most nights she didn’t ask for a smoke. After all, she was down to three cigarettes. However, tonight had been one of those nights where five to ten minutes in the alley alone would save her entire evening.…
Dark. Driving the country road on the way home to the city from her daughter’s, there was the county fair: Ferris Wheel, Tilt a Whirl, Fun House, lights a riotous invasion of a farm field.
Her daughter had told me she was pregnant again. Two children in two years. She didn’t need three. She had a part-time job as a bank teller. Her husband drove a delivery truck. They grew their own vegetables, cut their own hair.
Her daughter wanted her to move in with them before the new baby, be a babysitter, be with family as she got old, add her social security to what they had. Better for everyone, her daughter said. There was a little shack behind the run-down farmhouse. It has potential, her daughter said.…
Author’s Note: These acrylic paintings from Jerusalem Florists series deal with the merging positive and negative colours, as well as everyday life with classic art. I started by using for inspiration frames of colour negative films taken in downtown Jerusalem (instead of painting in the open air, which was very tenable considering our extremely hot climate and the sun that in summer kills any distinguishable colour). By adding to these nearly documentary scenes free quotations from the old masters’ still lives, I tried to create complex visions to trace the link between the real and the surreal, between colourless and colourful, between present-day and old, between cultivated and wild, and between daydream and nightmare.…
They raise a flag in time with the rising sun as the squad takes aim. “What a pity,” they say. Not bothering to cover the sound of their words. “She was such a lovely thing.” Mato looks up and meets my eyes, which would be a sign of submission to these savages. My father walks over and takes my hand.
I know he’s showing me mercy, letting me know that even though I carry the child of a ‘wild man,’ he still stands by me. He’s offering me sympathy. Not for my loss, as we stand waiting for my husband’s death, but for the indignities I suffered having to live such a life with the tribe. My tribe.
I see only Mato’s face as I step in front of the firing squad.…
