Red Cherries and Mottled Beans

Her skin was the color of sand after a rain storm and as smooth as a shell. On that morning her finger tips were as if they had been dipped in red wine. It was the season for cherries and how she loved cherries. She popped them in her tiny mouth and spit the pits out into her hands all afternoon. And now the bread would be kneed with her juice stained hands, lending a new and subtle sweetness to the dough. Her children wouldn’t notice and either would The Tempest.

                The Tempest, or as he as more commonly known, her husband, would be home from the sea this afternoon and she wanted to make something special. So that morning she went down to the wharf to pick up the usual amounts of lemons and flour and yeast. But she also bought a pound of almonds and several handfuls of dark cherries. It took all her will power to not eat the while of them on her way back up the dusty streets and spit the pits into ditches and side streets alike. She would pray to the ruby red god who looked after all fruits with a pitted center that they would grow and she could have cherries rain on her every time she made her way to the early simmer market.

                She allowed herself only three of the nearly black spheres on her way home. The first one she ate right away. Its tight skin split so easy with the closing of her jaws. The savored the release of sweet and mildly tart juice. With her tongue she muscled the flesh away from the stone, the seed. Once cleared of every fiber she-- with as much femininity as she could muster--- spit the pit into her palm and tucked it into a fold in her sari.

                This fold she created specifically for seeds and pit of fruits she loved. Countless cherry pits found their way into the pocket. Beans that were mottled with purples, blues and grays once filled the secret space. She found them at a market as she traveled west, the basket was spilling over with these beauties and she vowed to plant them in whatever garden she would call home. When she reached the sea side village on the Mediterranean and married the tempest, she buried the seeds and tended them with as much care as she could.

The spade shaped leaved climbed all the way up a ladder leaning against the house and bunched like a great crown on the eves. She was still learning the language of these people and there for named them in her native Sanskrit: sahasrara, one thousand one thousand. The vines gave off hundreds of beautiful purple and white flowers in the early heat of summer and the pods the extended form them were long and slender. They were plan green and were deceiving. Who would have thought that such a common and simple looking plant would yield thousands of pearl like beans with such colors?  When the rains subside and the dry season is upon them, the green selves shrink back and cling to the seeds within, like a string of beads that lives. Finally when the time is right, the seams open up and one thousand beans tumble to the ground below. They were prefect in their dented ovular shape, swirled and splotched with purples and navies, and whites.

In time, the children would help her collect them into clay vessels. In the coarse of things, they would get board to collecting them into bowls and find them perfect for throwing at one another. Intercepting a flying troop of mottled projectiles, she scolds them gently and reminds them that this is their dinner and is not meant to be thrown around. They would cease for the day but come the next and the day after that, they would see them fit for pelting each other again. But she knows this and will, in her best attempts, make their lives happy and nondestructive, especially when it comes to the garden and their meals.

But when the cherries fall from they’re boughs daily, the beans are just several leaves and two tendrils wrapped around the legs of the ladder.

The Crow People

When we are born, a crow is sacrificed in the name of the child and in honor of the birth. Its face and upper beak are cut away and adhered to the newborns head. The unguent glue by which the child’s new face is attached is made from the bones of those fled in war or those lost to illness.

By this initiation we, The Crow People, are forever reminded of our connection to death, for it fuels that which lives, and reminds us of our debt to the ancestors. It is they who taught us how to hunt both crow and caribou. It was they who showed us how to plant the seeds year in and harvest them year out. And it was them who made the rites and rituals. Without them, the crows and our forbears, we are lost; forever scraping our way through life, through an abyss, an oblivion.

But they do provide life and we are ever grateful.

The crows grow abnormally large in the foothills, or so we are told by those passing through our land. Because of the large size, they’re sacrificed and the fashioned masks are able to be placed and molded to a babies face without much manipulation. The crow’s eyes are removed and given to the godparents for safe keeping. Wither by magic or science or both, the crow-mask grow with the child. As we mature, old feathers fall out and are replaced by new plumage, shiny and soft as oil. Our faces are covered to the jaw with the feathers and are then stop to meet the hard obsidian beak.

No doubt other fauna or even flora were attempted to become part of ourselves. Perhaps back in a time just before the creation of the world, our people attempted to embed goat horns to their forehead, projecting verity and strength. Or mint leaves sewn into fingertips to spread its sweet-tingling scent wherever one was to place their hands. But for what ever reason the god have deemed them to stay separate from us—other than through the occasion ingestion—and we forever belong solely to the crows.

Because you are a Shooting Star

*Please excuse the momentary dredging up of my intestines (which is really a string of metaphors), my stomach (really a bag of similes), my pancreas (a producer of personification), and my lower organs (these are just my testicles) for your reading pleasure*

I can’t bare this anymore. I see you all false and with out direction; like the illusion that is the aura borealis which secretly wants to be a solar flare or part of the deep space nebulas. No! This is too heavy for gravity, this need. No, it’s not a need, not a want, not even a desire. It is a wish.

Like a shooting star in the night sky of my life. All hot and bright and fast for less than a moment. You are not an expedition to mars or a fleet of mining ships that extract iron ore or diamonds in meteors. These are wants, these are desires. You are just a shooting star and shooting stars are just wishes incarnate.

Not a comet are you either. Comets are my reoccurring lovers who enter my orbit, penetrating my atmospheric layers for days. Shooting stars are quick and they punch and burn up all their helium and oxygen in my nitrogen rich aura. But shows of orgasmic creation can not happen in a vacuum. No new worlds to explore are in a shooting star. No vast caverns which formed in the great blackness of space in which to play. I can not. I will not pulse my way through the empty space.

How I do wish to reach out across the universe and touch that icy hot tail, that speck of cosmic dust in process of using up everything it ever was. But it is to quick, not sustainable and my blazing iron core will never make journeys through space/time for something so fleeting.

Will you someday crash into my crust? Will it require such force that you cram a creator into my surface, a mark, a forever? Can you reach my skin and kick up green earth and bury yourself past my blushing red mantle and merge with my core? Do you have the strength to endure my gravitational field?

Perhaps not. Wishes burn too quick to have the desire to met a solid planet. They’re only cause in space is to be peaceful, glide through a void and one day, when the time is right… Pop to life with brilliance all their own. With the last atom of carbon or magnesium or phosphorus release they’re final thought: they hope someone, somewhere below was there to bear witness.