Shrubbery of Home

When he was younger he would piss in the thick underbrush that lay behind his house. He lived in a compound consisting of five main houses, long and hollow, with drafts hammering through them like beating drums. They never had money for concrete, they never had money for the men of dark colored skin to come from behind the mountains and lay mortar and stone on their grass, so the meadow remained meadow, nature remained somewhat untouched. For him this meant so much, and yet nothing at all, in youth one takes for granted so much and so did he, running in the fields, urinating in the lush grass of his backyard. In youth he was free, because his cheeks were flushed with red and because he use to love to run on chilly autumn days when the grass was soggy with dew. In youth he would run with his cousins behind the house, he would sprint through grass – knee-high, waist-thick – and scrape his young, thin legs against their wet, splintered blades. When he was young he would roll in the grass, he would laugh in the grass and jump in the grass. They would crawl through the grass and they would drag their pointed chins along the dirt and mud of the ground, clumps of brown forming beards on their young hairless flesh. He would drink water from a tiny creek that hid in the grass, that sat like a honey comb and fed sweet goo to the blades of grass. He would lay in the grass and stare at the ever-changing sky. And sometimes, only sometimes, the grass would entwine in his mind, or his callow spirit would overwhelm his body, and his inside, and he would pee on the chartreuse specks and flecks of shrubbery. This was freedom to him, as a boy, this was freedom and this was pleasure, peeing on the thicket behind their house at fall.

He sits and feeds pigeons now. He sits at the fringe of the park, where the green melts off onto the concrete road, and some of the brights sun spills over onto the bench, and the fence and the parked cars. He sits very still for no bone in his body can move properly. He can barely breathe because of a cold that invests his insides, and he hasn't breathed properly for such a long time that he doesn't know whether it is in his head of whether his lungs are shriveling. His body aches. His kneecaps creak, his neck is paralyzed, his mouth no longer quivers in the cold chill of autumn because if it did there would be too much pain. All noises hurt his ears, the cars are thunder, the birds lightings, the wind in the trees the rumble of and earthquake or an air raid. Air raid, there is always and air raid, in his head, in his bones, in his ears, in his lungs, the constant roar of pain, and the constant flight of consciousness. He is dizzy, constantly.

Maybe that is why he felt the need, the urgency, the sheer obligation to himself, to freedom, to urinate on the thick grass behind the park bench. Sometimes the pain became unbearable, sometimes he could no longer stand the roaring and the engines and the noise. He secretes on the thick underbrush that was so lushly like his hometown, and the pain disappears. He is calm. He is at peace. When he stands facing the grass at the fringe of the park, where it's sunlights leaks from the cracks in the park fence, then he is free again, young again. Then nobody can tell him he is mortal, for he is not. For he is now the grass blade, the thick, wet grass blade shivering in the chill of the autumn morning. When he is this grass blades he has no rattling lung and so he breathes in all of the atmosphere, imbibes the sunlight and the sky. When he pees on the grass he is not merely peeing on the grass. He is young again. He is at freedom's peak, climax.

“It's dirty.” She says, she lives close by so her opinion does count, she walks through the park at early morning and sometime she sees him do it, or sometimes she merely smells his excess, but she doesn't like it. “It's dirty.” She says. She tells it to her friends a lot too, they walk through the park and they bark at him, they yell and they toss insults. His mouth still can't move, and even if it could his lungs hurt when he talks, so he does not reply.

“It's just men from the south.” She says with a snort, and her friends laugh, contemptuously, “You know how they are.”

“I don't understand it, it's a park! A park for people, and children that run around here day and night! Think of the germs! Think of the germs!”

She yells loud sometimes. Sometimes she comes over to him, sometimes merely when he is sitting on the bench watching immortality pass him by, she walks over to him and spits in his face. She starts off calmly, saying that she cannot understand how amazingly stupid he is, and disgusting, and ubsurd. But then she begins to shout. She yells louder and louder. Her red face becomes even reader, the thick black pen from her eye pencil looks like a vein under her red, bulging eyes, that puslates and changes from black to blue to purple. She yells so loud she begins to spit at him even though she doesn't mean to. Or at least, she doesn't seem to mean to, he is never sure. She shreiks so loud his ear drums quiver and shake, he wants to yell at her to stop, “It hurts!” He wants to say, “Shut up!” But he doesn't have the lungs to say it. She yells and yells and then she stops, walks away muttering something about the south and those that live there.

But he doesn't really listen. He continues to pee in the park, in the thick grass and the thick shrubbery because if he doesn't it is the end for him. Immortality does not exist, neither does youth and all life has died. He needs the grass, he knows this, it's his lifeline. His bread and water.

So in November twelve he dies. Well, he doesn't, not quiet yet. But on the quiet morning, when the dew clings to the blades of grass like babies, like phlegm, the air is blanketed by mist and the sky is nonexistant, he decides it is a good time for a walk, for a sit down at the bench, for a contemplation of his life. He puts on the necessary clothes, not so warm because clothing himself requires motion that he can not do and in sheer exhaustion and pain he decides he does not want to put on any more clothes. He walks out his door, shuffles a little bit, arrives at the park where the mist is beginning to fade and the sky pierces through it like fish bones. He stops at the park bench. He is in agony, he is in shock. It is not his lungs, no, not this time. It is not his kneecaps, though that has happened once before. It is not his ear drums, that sense is numb. No, at that very moment he is stabbed by the brutal, tormenting pain that comes with the loss of freedom. There, in front of him, right beside the bench on the little hill of lush grass, was a newly built bathroom. It stood heavy, tall and proud on top of the blades, choking and smothering them with it's weight. Despite his broken lungs and his paralyzed mouth, he lets out a shriek.

“That's right.” He hears behind him, and he turns around to see her, her skin old and her back crooked but her eyes still bright and shining with menace. “There, you finally got what you deserve, now you can stop pissing on public property, you dirty rat.”

He doesn't say anything as he shuffles back to his house. The mist is almost gone by the time he opens his door and the sky is in full view, large and thick and ready to engulf him. He looks back at the grass one last time before he closes the door. He feels nostalgic for the shrubbery of home.

Primitive Genius

    I am sitting in the train station observing human stupidity. There are three doors into the train station, two automatic and one that is locked. The locked one has a sign beside it that apologizes for the inconvenience.  Other than that it is just a locked door. Yet there are still problems.
    People are everywhere, that’s one problem. Rushing back and forth. Talking up and down. Breathing, laughing, cocooned in their private feelings and wool to keep them safe from the cold. The floors are marble and each footstep rings against the floor so the hall is a void of noise. Coughing, walking, crying. The floor quivers lightly.  And human stupidity is everywhere. A woman aims chapped lips to a straw of a cold drink — but misses. A little boy accidentally pulls a hat over his pink, pudgy face. A man looks for his glasses — eyebrows frowning, eyes frantic — but the glasses are placed neatly on his head.
    And I am watching all this stupidity and find it funny, but also enlightening. Here we are, under a man-made roof, on man-made floor, basking in the wonder that is man-made genius. And yet when faced with simple tasks man still makes mistakes. Still wavers on the line that separates ape and human intelligence. I decide to see the line clearly for myself and I sit, watching the locked door, staring it down. This is the line, I tell myself. Behind the locked door is the human mind, smart, quick and non-faltering. Before the locked door is primitively, man when he was hairy and walked on all fours. If man walks over to the locked door, ignores the sign, and expects it to open, then man really is simple. Man isn’t genius.
“Damn.” A man with a hat that droops over his face and dreadlocks that fall like black tears from his scalp, walking inot the locked door and swears when he realizes it isn’t open. He stares for a second and the glass that doesn’t open. He is staring the line straight in the face, his eyebrows knit and he frowns. His hands area clenched. And for a second he has seen it, he has seen the stupidity of man.
“Damn” He walks over to the working automatic door beside him. He walks into the trainstation and is greeted by busy, noisy people that don’t pay him any mind. He looks around him with dark eyes to made sure nobody saw his mistake, his stupidity.  His dreadlocks almost seem to relax and settle at his shoulders. Nobody has seen. He walks on.
   I giggle. I write a number one at the top of a sheet of notebook paper that I hold in my hands. I continue to watch closely, people rush past and people walk and people sit. The floor continues to rumble. I watch the snow outside gather and watch cold, purple hands touch the cold metal of the automatic doors.
   The next victim is a woman with tired eyes and a long red nose. She is outside the trainstation, outside the doors. Her face is mutated through the glass, her eyes are mismatched, skin on her face is like the patches of a patchwork blanket. She waits behind the locked door. Waiting. Watching the metal door handles that never split appart. Listening for the creaking sound of opening that never rings out. She shakes her head, reads the sign and realizes her mistake. She enters the trainstation through the doors that work and I realize it wasn’t the glass that mutated her face. She enters the trainstation and her eyes hand even lower, she continues to shake her head because she has experianced the stupidity of man too. She shivers, as if the experiance scares her.
   I laugh out loud, quietening down when those around me stare. I write a bold number two on the top of my paper and I laugh again as I watch the woman with the mutated face scurry down the busy trainstation, shaking her head, pretending the door incident never happened.
    There are six in total. A sort man with large boots that consumed his knees, a young woman with a ponytail, a middle aged man with a long jacket and a young boy with a round stomach. Some laugh, some jolt, some stay quiet but they are all stung with the spark of embarrassment. They stand there, nose to the locked automatic door that they thought would open and they are poisoned with a electricity of shame. With the electricity the ape inside every man. No matter how long the pony tail, or how large the boots, man cannot totally hide his ancestor. Staring at the glass of the locked door they all realized this.
  I laugh everytime. At last I have to move over a couple of seats because those around me are annoyed by my laughing. I write a huge six on the top of my paper, smiling. I am watching these people -- these humans -- and I think about how stupid they all area and I am scoffing at them, jeering and mocking their stupidity.
    But then there comes a young man. Black hair down to his shoulders, a hairy face with a large beard and huge eyebrows like the dark clouds of the outside. He has huge ears and a large flat nose. He is walking fast. His feet seem to fly. He is not paying attention. Speeding, racing, not looking. He hits the door with great force, great ferocity. The line between ape and man hits him in the face. Peirces his skin, slicing his cheek. Knocks him off his feet. He falls to the floor and then he is still. His face turns pale white in the coldness of the outdoors.
    I don’t move. I want to watch, I want to look at the bare street of the outside, snow convered, ice frozen where the man lies. I look at the busy people that rush back and forth and I wonder who will ever find the man that lies like a statue fallen on the snow. His feet quiver lightly. Nobody notices. His frozen eyes twitch. Nobody sees. He is unseen by the stupid world that ignores him and ignores the world around them.
    I continue to watch. I watch and I see a woman walk out of the train station and see him, the statue, lieing on the floor. She screams, runs back into the train station and she is absorbed by the crowd and out of sight. I get out of my seat, a little worried and almost guilty. I let the white sheet of notebook paper, covered in numbers, fall to my sides. Walking over to the train station door I am pushed to the side by rushing people. Security personnel and the woman that disappeared are rushing out of the automatic doors and they run over to the man that lies still on the floor. They yell for him to wake up. They pat his face.  They call him, nag him. He doesn’t wake up but the security personnel lift him. One by one more and more people start running to the door. A young woman runs over to the man and asks the security personnel whether there is anything she can do. An old man offers his cane. A little girl fetches a glass of water. The security personnel walks with the man, snow covered, drenched in bruises and behind them walks hundreds. I am close by and do not follow but I can hear the crowd.
“I have water”
“I have band-aids”
“Shall I call the hospital?”
Moments later there is the whirl of an ambulance and huge men in white jump out and dive into the crowd. They lift the snow covered man into their arms and they lift him into the ambulence. The lights of the ambulance relfects on the snow and flashes blue and white blue and white. People are crying. Tissues fall into the snow and melt like snowflakes. They watch the doctors as they lift the man into the ambulance and place him on a white bed, as white as the snow. The doors close and the ambuelnce leaves with a ringing louder then footsteps. The blue and white lights dissappear and then outside is dark. The crowds watch quietly as they ambuelence dissappears and so does the unconcious man with the large ears and the hairy face.

    I walk back into the trainstation. The station half empty now, and my insides too. I think about the man and his hairy face. I think about the line between man and ape. Then I think about the old man that offered his cane. Maybe man is not stupid, I think and pick up my paper from the floor and throw it in the trash can, maybe man is merely composed of a sort of primitive genius.

Life's Minor Interuptions

I have this problem. I'm painting, it's midday, and I can't tell whether the yellow is my paint or the sunlight. I don't know whether the blue it my water color or the thin sheet of air in front of me.

My mother walks in often. Her hair is round like a balloon, not a hair out of place. That's what my mother's like. She does not like stray hairs or stray anything. She walks in and she is bathing in yellow paint.

“Lu! What are you still doing here? It's lunch time!”

I don't really make an attempt to argue, I dab at my painting, I say,

“I've had my lunch.” I point at a unfinished sandwich at the corner of the room. A paint-covered sandwich.

“What about the girl? I told her you'd meet her at lunch.”

I remember slowly who it is she is talking about. But I continue to dab the pink on my female apparitions that dance on my canvas. I think about how nice and quiet the canvas looks. I like quiet.

“I don't know what to do with you, I really don't. Do you want to stay in this studio all your life? Do you?”

I don't answer and my mother and that is the last straw. She leaves the room with a noise and the sunlight does not miss her when she is gone. I continue drawing pink apparitions on my canvas. Pink like the meat of juicy grapefruit. I do not look up from my canvas or my apparitions.

“Lucas.”

It's my younger brother and it's his tie-wearing day. Beside him is a women completely dressed in pink. Her face is pink, too. So are her slender arms and her bony ankles.

“What are you doing today?” He asks me. The women besides him merely swaying in the sun's gentle breath, as if she doesn't exist.

“This.” I say and turn back to my canvas. I dab some more. This time it is the blue of a pond, greenish-blue and the golden dot of sunlight is the goldfish.

“But what about the women!?” My younger brother cries.

I ignore him and give my goldfish an eye.

“Don't tell me you've forgotten! This afternoon! The party! Lucy will be there and you know how much we like Lucy!” I look slowly up at his pink lady friend standing beside him. I wonder if she minds what my brother is saying about Lucy. The pink lady seems to melt in the sun, like paint.

“You coming?”

There is a silence and it claws at my canvas.

“No.” I say.

My younger brother looks at me with the most ugly combination of frustration and sympathy.

“I don't understand you.” He says, and he walks out of the door, his quiet, pink lady friend follows him out. I continue to paint the orange scales of my goldfish, orange-peel-yellow and happiness-red. I think about how beautiful fish are.

The door opens again and this time the studio stinks of perfume.

“Lucas, honey. I thought you'd be at work!”

I do not look up from my canvas, or the golds and yellows, because it is only Anne and I wouldn't mind if the sun just inhaled her.

“You spend so much time over here. What about making a living? What about our money?” Her face is suffocating in yellow sunlight, so I can't see her expression, but I can hear the anger and desperation in her voice. I see the hems of her velvet, green dress. It looks expensive. I see that in her right hand she is holding a plastic bag full of water and inside the bag is a tiny goldfish. It's scales like yellow orange peel.

“Why Lucas?” She walks over to me and she sits down on a stool. I see her and her slits of green eyes, she places the goldfish at her side. “Don't you want me to be happy?”

It's a long answer and I don't want to waste her precious time, so I say,

“Where did you get that goldfish from?”

She looks at me like I am crazy.

“I worry about you a lot, Lucas. Always painting. I barely talk to you anymore.” She holds her face in her green hands, and the water in the goldfish's bag quivers, “Do you know how that feels, Lucas? Do you know how it feels to have the man you love never speak to you?”

I grunt. I swirl a blob of sun light on my pallet and I draw a pineapple on the edge of my canvas.

“Okay Lucas.” She says, “Okay. I understand. It's clear to me now. We've kept this relationship a secret, but now –“

The air rustles as she stands up.

“Now we're over.”

She leaves the room and she takes the golden goldfish with her. It takes a while for the room to be quiet again. The dust particles nestle back down on the floorboards, beams of light slowly stop shaking. It's quiet and still again and I continue painting my pineapple. Big and happy and yellow. That's how I want it. Something that gives people something to talk about, something to dream about, breath.

“Lu.” The door opens, Sam is in the room, absorbing the yellow paint. “We've got to talk.”

I look at him. I nod. But I notice something odd about him. On his head he is not wearing a hat but a pineapple. Big and yellow and happy. I smile. Sam's wrinkled sagging face gives me a quizzical look and I curse that I do not have a camera to capture one of life's most beautiful moments.

“It's the money, Lu.” He says, he sits down on the stool in front of me and the pineapple on his head wobbles slightly. I continue to smile, “I love your paintings, you know I do. But I've got a job...and a family. I don't know how long I can support you, Lu.”

I look at him as the sunlight reveals the ugly silliness of his face and his chubby, round body.

“I want to support you but the truth is I don't have enough money...”I watch the pineapple jiggle as he speaks and it makes me laugh slightly. Sam frowns. “Why you staring at my head for Lu? I'm serious! I feel terrible. I know how you love your art but...”

I see him, his pineapple and his wrinkled face and suddenly I see the goldfish swimming in the yellow paint behind him.

“You can't make a living from it anymore, Lu....I'm sorry...”

Suddenly the pink women appears beside him. She's swimming in the sunlight, too. They are all swimming. The pineapple bobs like it would if it were on a swaying branch.

“Lu! Aren't you paying attention!”

The pink women's face is soft and gentle, and I see her mouth curl into a beautiful smile. She strokes the pineapple and she laughs.

“Don't you care, Lu?! Lu!”

The yellow paint washes her face and even the goldfish seems to be smiling. A wet, sneaky smile.

“Oh! I don't know! A man tries to be generous and then...”

Sam gets up from his stool and so does the pink women and the pineapple and the goldfish. They are all laughing now. I am laughing too because I understand the inside joke.

“Lu! Why are you laughing!? I am serious!”

The pink lady dusts off her skirt and smiles again.

“Well...okay...if you think this a joke then I will too!”

The pink lady blows me a kiss from the depth of the yellow sunlight that caresses her pink skin.

“Goodbye!”

The door slams close. It is deadly silent. Sam is gone and so are the others, the goldfish, the pink lady, the pineapple, everything. I wait, patiently. Soon the dust has settled and the beams of light have stopped shaking. There is no noise. I look at my painting bathed in this new silence. I admire the yellows and reds. I decide to call it, “A Warm Collage of Life's Minor Interruptions.”