Squirrels and Cardinal

A scream woke her up. It wasn't a horrific scream, more of a squeal, but it felt a little like a horror movie scream heard from within her dream. What was that dream? The details were vague, but it was about him. About Eric. About Eric who had been visiting her dreams. Maybe it wasn't even about Eric, but that since she had been meeting up with him in her dreams every night for the past weeks. It was probably him. But she can't remember what was happening. She could start imagining, and the imagination would easily creep into her psyche and melt into her belief into reality.

She sat up with her pillow packed between her lower and the back frame. She made the final step off the bridge that spanned the river between her dream world and the reality in which the squeal had yanked her onto the bridge. What was it? She felt the warmth of her comforter, the warmth that itself was a blanket she had naturally quilted overnight. She felt the softness of the sheets, and she liked it so much that she unconsciousness started caressing the covers a little bit.

What was that squeal?

There it went again.

And there were other sounds like. Sounds of frolicking. Giggling. Things running up and down barks. She wanted to get out of bed and look through the window, to see what the little commotion was about. But the warmth she had woven overnight didn't let her go. The cocoon was too loving, especially in contrast to the suffering, both in the vast reality and the limitless dreams that have both made her feel like a cold iceberg floating aimlessly. Now, she was a tropical island, warmth abound, however isolated it was by that same boundless difficulty that awaited her at bay. She looked at the window from her comfort zone and saw just the white, overcast sky sketched by the bare winter branches, as if it was just a white sheet with thin, clear dark strokes of a master Chinese painter. The branches swayed a little, in the wind, and jerked a little when the squeals shot out.

They were the squirrels, no doubt. She had seen them sometimes when she worked from her desk, when she looked out. In her mind, the branches always seemed bare, abstract. There used to be a different painting in her mind, one of colorful, fiery flame of passion that was of her and Eric, six years, longer than she had lived here, within the warmth of her bedroom. There used to be that painting, autumn leaves, spring flowers. There had been many winters, but she, until now, had a very different painting. Now, someone has bleached the canvass and put on these bare, masterful black strokes of branches.

She was surprised she didn't want to cry. Maybe she was done, maybe she was too bitter to humiliate herself again. The warmth of her cocoon faded, replaced by a shudder as if the winter wind had found a crack in the window that she was looking at. Her big blue eyes looked away from the bright window and she lowered her head a little. She then remembered the phone call before she went to bed. The phone rang and she remembered hoping, again, that it was Eric calling. It was a sister, and her disappointment was barely contained in her voice. She was checking on her again. It's been three months, and she was still checking on her, rightfully, but it was becoming more and more humiliating. But she couldn't reject good intention. At that thought she turned to look at the phone lying on the bed stand. No calls. The the redness of the phone seemed so out of place in this mostly white bedroom. Beige bedsheets, pale blue walls, white ceiling, white bed stand, even the alarm clock is light brown, milk with a little coffee. And here was a red phone, with a black center on which silver letters spelling out the manufacturer's name were etched.

She pressed the black buttons, and the little screen lit up, showing no calls. No calls. No messages. And her cheeks reddened. Hot. Rage? More humiliation? More sadness? Didn't matter. She slowly slid back into her bed, her head resting back on the pillow that had supported her lower back.

That's bad. It became horrifically familiar, staying in bed, in this warmth that would become suffocating instead of comforting, trapped in there in her own self-pity. But it was too tempting. Why not? Why not continue the wallowing? More than three months, other people have had to endure longer. She was there already. She closed her eyes, ignoring the squealing that was disappearing anyway. In this darkness, figures came back out, images, the past. And rage and sorrow and love and desire, all mix up again. So familiar.

A flutter. What was that? A chirping. She opened her eyes. She looked out, her body propped up, betraying a deep-seated desire to actually break out of that cocoon. And there, in the painting of the window, the white bleached canvass with black, somber strokes, a red, alive flower.

Not a flower. It looked like it was blossoming. It moved, rotated on the branch. Its black eyes, its fluffy crown, all moving, as if talking to her. It chirped, quietly but confidently. She sat up, and her feet fell on the warm, cream color rug. She stood up, away from the comforter, in her light pink pajamas. She walked to the window, feeling the slight chill from the window panes, and she looked directly at the cardinal. At that moment the cardinal stopped moving, looking into the distance. She could see almost everything, including the golden beak, the brown eyes, details on that decadent red that breaks up the bleakness of the whole scene. She touched the cold surface of the desk and smiled. Just smiled, her blue eyes moist, her lips rosier, and she felt for the first time an ecstatic dizziness that unveiled the ember that was to revive her passion, passion for anything.

Between the Storms

The drive was smooth, the roads were clear, empty not only of snow but of people, who have opted to stay home lest the storm would get worse. But it didn't. There was a respite. So the drive was perfectly fine. And now, we are here, in the dance hall. There were as expected fewer people than usual. But here we've come not only for the dance but for also the music. The work week finally ended, and here we were, submerged in the music that took us to a different place, far from computer screens, the phone calls, the panicking secretary, the disillusioned coworker, the early leavers, and the overall city that centered around one university that want its own identity but often feel it had to shoulder the burden of the city it had long ago chosen. And we feel sometimes a burden, different kinds depending on the time of day, the day of the week, the season. The storm was just one of many in a series that had hammered this region.

But now, a respite.

Now the music flows through our bodies as well as souls, dissolving us entirely into its fluidity.

The stress associated with social dancing also took us to another place that at once familiar but also remote. I stood up and looked around, especially towards the section where the best dancers, or at least those who made themselves look the best, congregate. I tried looking nonchalant, avoiding any scent of despair. That particular skill of nonchalance had to be honed over the years. I remember in the beginning the frustration, the despair, the defeatism. And sadly those memories didn't seem so distant. The wounds of rejection were fresh and the seeds of fear were abound. Nevertheless, those beginning years. When self-confidence was put out there in the flesh, when vulnerability was lying in the open for the vultures to tease and attack. Now in this dim dance hall, part of a restaurant, I saw that neophyte from a few year's ago, and I could still taste the dry mouth, the hopeless schemes to get dances, the nervousness of maintaining the catch, and the many internecine months of avoiding the dance to recuperate in the hospice of my own soul a battered pride and a wounded ego.

But as I stood there, surveying the availability and calculating the likelihood of rejection, I melted, involuntarily, or more precisely, by an external force. Not a force. What was it?

It was the music. The music that, unlike the actual dance, always made me happy, always welcomed me, never put on a wall of rejection. And in this respite between the the storm that had been unleashed yesterday and the storm that would follow us up the road back home later, I was suffused in the music that could be romantic and tragic, playful and joyous, or simply a poetry of a country and its people I've only met in my imagination forged by the music. How can there be wounds and egos and anger when you are the music? The music itself isn't a tragedy, isn't at all what it is singing; the music itself is the love. And so I sat back down, my nervous heart resumed its normal rhythm that is in sync with the beat of this music of a far away city that has no blizzards or the respites between blizzards. And whatever happened the rest of the evening, I was already enjoying this break between the past and a future I have yet to meet.

Cream Cheese

"You want to try a bagel?" he asked, slightly timidly. The old man smiled, with just about the same measure of diffidence, and said, "Sure." "Sit," said the young man, and then he turned to the pantry and pulled out a bag full of cinnamon raisin bagels. He then realized his dad was still standing. He sighed a little, frowning to show his disapproval, which, as he expected, made no effect. He took out two bagels before putting the bag of the rest back in the pantry. He wasn't sure if his dad was watching him take a plate out and splitting the bagel. His kitchen was much bigger than the old man's, and in the young man's opinion, much more organized. He had always been proud of his kitchen. That was why he wondered if his dad noticed. And he wondered if his dad noticed anything about the bagel.

"Have you had a bagel before?"

"No."

In that case, he never had cinnamon before. A piece of bark. But he said nothing. He put the halves of the two bagels open side up into the toaster oven, and pressed the toast button.

"Sit, sit," said the young man. And when he himself sat down, the old man sat down.

Did he notice about the stool? The old man probably never sat on a bar stool before. But he's such a mystery; he was quiet, not even his own son had much of an inkling on what the old man was thinking, his impressions, his thoughts. Every now and then he would say something the son wanted to hear, like in the previous day when the old man tried one of his son's baked goods for the first time, "Wow, I didn't know you could bake." That was what the young man wanted to hear, and he was delighted to hear it from this otherwise very reticent man.

But otherwise, like now, he said nothing, nothing expected nor unexpected. They had the special chai the son had prepared a few minutes ago. "I got this recipe from India," said the son. His dad knew he went to India, but he never asked about it, and this time the son wanted him to ask, or at least acknowledge that he went on this trip. But nothing. The father took a sip of the hot, milky drink, and said, quietly, "Has a nice aroma." For a Chinese, his dad didn't drink much tea, never did. He drank coffee for the sake of the milk and not the coffee, the son had learned this weekend. And this aromatic "tea" was even more foreign to him, but its milky taste reminded him of coffee.

"Not too sweet?"

"No. It's fine."

His not only never had a chai, but rarely drank from a cup, probably never from a glass except occasionally at a restaurant. In his house he drank everything from a bowl, including wine. Most of his life he spent during some upheaval or post-upheaval upheaval, and the only thing one could literally count on was a bowl that could hold soup, water, rice, and occasionally other foods. When time and suffering bind you to a way of life, it's hard to get out of it when time and suffering stopped possessing you like a haunting.

Still, his son couldn't know what he was really thinking, sitting there, on a bar stool for the first time, at a marble kitchen counter top for the first time, with his son, just with his son, in his son's house, for the firs time. His eyes were surrounded by deep wrinkles, his lower eyelids swollen with time. His gaze had always been at some distance, even when speaking to someone.

"It's Indian," the young man reiterated.

A mutter from the old man's pale lips was the only acknowledgment of the reiteration. They chitchatted a little more about things at home, the old man's work, and then the toaster oven made a sound, indicating that the bagels were ready. The young man stood up to get the bagel, and he was a little relieved that his dad stayed sitting.

"I hope you like it," said the young man to his dad who has never smelled bagels before, just seen its pictures on advertisements.

The young man opened the fridge door and took out a small container of cream cheese.

"You know what this is?"

"Butter?"

His dad knew that milk made butter and yogurt and cheese. His son was delighted to keep showing him off all these things the old man had been missing all his long and arduous life. "I don't know how to explain it. It's a kind of cheese, but not really. Kind of like butter. You spread on the bagel."

He took the butter knife and started spreading it for his dad. The young man was making the wavy motion with the knife on the spread cream cheese, the way he always did most mornings where this was on his short list of breakfast possibilities. And he was sharing this piece of his life with him.

"That's enough. I don't need a lot of cheese," said the old man, looking honored that his son was preparing food for him.

"Sure? Usually I put more."

Sure, of course. It wasn't about being afraid of trying something new. It wasn't about not liking this white, amorphous novelty. It was about not eating too much. His dad was never a small eater, but he had always eaten large volumes of scrap. For the whole of the young man's life, he had only seen the old man eat whatever the children didn't eat, either because they were picky or they were full. And for a long time, he didn't even eat with them, but rather watched them eat. To put more cream cheese than absolutely necessary was a waste unless no one wanted the cream cheese. He fed his body out of necessity, but he had no real opinion about what it liked or preferred. Preference was in the realm of his children. He would suck off the bits from bones or eat the extremely fatty skins off roasts because those were the parts no one wanted. And to be fair, it wasn't always for his children. He had from early on taught his children to also bear suffering first before enjoying life. And it came down to the tiniest details like eating the less desirable parts before enjoying the nicer parts, of anything, of life or of food.

However, in his presence, he always told his children to eat up all the best parts of the meal, and implicitly he would finish up whatever wasn't eaten, and he, like an omnibus machine, could eat off almost any parts of any vegetable or animal. He had never said it, but his son had learned in ways he hadn't quite grasped, that suffering was the only path towards enjoyment. Such was the paradox he had to grapple with all his life.

The young man reluctantly gave his dad the bagel half with a thin layer of cream cheese on it, as if it were butter. For himself, he, also with some reluctance, spread some cream cheese on one of the halves.

"Good?"

"Yes. Thank you very much, it's very good."

He remembered one time when he offered his old man wine, the latter couldn't refuse. And he nearly drank the wine from a bowl before his son insisted on a glass. There was so much politeness, their relationship anything but casual. His dad would never refuse anything unless it would cause him huge inconvenience. Wine might make him feel bad the later on, but he couldn't refuse his son. As they both bit into their respective bagel halves, the son felt that gap between them that, however wide, always had some unexpected bridge laid across. And now they were standing in the middle of this bridge, a suspension bridge, over a darkness the young man still could not comprehend but felt very keenly, while the old man simply didn't care. He met his son in the middle simply because the latter wanted that to happen.

"This cheese is famous from Philadelphia. Remember that city? We went there together the first time?"

"Yes. I remember. The bell. You let me drive. That was the last time I drove."

That was ten years ago. Ten years was how long the chasm seemed to be.

Chinese Heritage of Spending Money

At the Chinese class today we were finishing up the discussion of spending money. As with many topics so far, I felt strangely connected to a culture that is at once changing and traditional. The topic of spending money was, however, thus far most personal to me. It made it clearer to me than any other time sitting in that class how much of a relic my family is, a snapshot from a past generation that was in the original country changing rapidly.

The discussion was about attitude towards spending money. Traditionally, the class material was claiming, Chinese people never spent more than they earned, and in fact, they hoarded their money as often as possible. It was understandable coming from a country whose population by and large suffered nearly continuously for millennia. To contrast this behavior was the American example. Americans for the most part believe in spending, and not only their earnings but also on credit. The different behavior reflects a difference in attitude towards life. Continuing with the generalizations, Chinese traditionally fear the future and would rather work hard now and suffer at a bearable amount so that later on when real suffering was upon them they would be prepared. On the other hand, Americans largely believe that life is for enjoying now, at the moment, and they would do what it took to enjoy it, even if they borrowed money. This would explain the nature of the credit collapse that is happening now in this country, and whose consequences have drawn the world into a recession. The Chinese, on the other hand, had been the creditor in this whole mess because their people still amassed large amount of money in their savings accounts.

These macroeconomic phenomena are interesting, but in class I was thinking about my own behavior, and their origins in my parents' behavior. When the teacher said that certain Chinese immigrants here still refuse to pay on credit, refuse installment plans, while their former compatriots in Mainland have opened their minds to buying things on credit that they would otherwise not be able to afford, I thought about how my mother insisted that I bought my car with cash. I thought about how my Dad could not sleep for nearly 15 years because he owed the bank money on their mortgage. I remember how they would refuse to use credit cards unless absolutely necessary. I, on the other hand, use credit cards, but never the way many Americans use, which is paid back in installments. I always paid the full amount back. Using credit card is merely a means of convenience for me, and often I do so to get some cash back, another typical attitude of immigrant Southern Chinese who think a lot about money.

I, too, have a mortgage to pay back to the bank every month, but I actually put in extra money each month just to expedite the process and at the same time lower my overall interest payment. This was the same method and attitude I held for college loans. I had no choice but to take out loans from the government, and only from the government whose interest rate was the lowest. I worked part-time to avoid other loans. And as soon as I got out of college, I frantically paid back my loans, and I paid it back within a year, much faster than anyone else I knew. In class we learned an old Chinese saying, something like "no debt no worries". Chinese people traditionally hated debt, it weighed on their finances as much as their minds. My dad told me no less than twice that I should never get into debt. For us, a mortgage is a worthwhile debt, not only because we couldn't otherwise afford a house, but more importantly, it was an investment. Investment was, for me, and for many traditional Chinese thinkers, the only justification for debt. If it weren't for investing in real estate I would rather rent. Renting not only means property ownership responsibilities are irrelevant, but also means free of being chained to the bank.

But American attitudes aren't the same. So many buy fancy electronics on installments, enticed by a financial industry that, until now, offered absurd rates. And the worst example is buying a house that they could not afford but until now were able to buy because of low down payments. When I put down my down payment for this house I put down more than the minimum required.

Sitting in my class I realized how different I was from many Americans, and strangely, how much I have been affected by my parents' beliefs. And I wonder if I am too extreme. Obviously, being financially conservative means safer future. I own the little I have in my life, except for the house. And the keyword is not just "own" but "little". Somehow, perhaps also through my parents' influence, I am not eager to own many things. I am not interested in the latest gadgets, game consoles, newest computer, and many things that many of my fellow citizens buy for no reason but to temporarily satiate an emptiness in life. I guess I fill my version of that emptiness with something else, but not with goodies and gadgets.

Watching the teacher speak, and the students' faces, I put myself in a strange perspective. This idea of how to spend money is very different in the two cultures I have embraced. It invoked questions dormant at times, questions about the origins of my behaviors. It sometimes feel like looking at a pixelated painting and trying to figure out what primary colors were used to create the dotted figures. I looked at those young faces and wondered what they have been and will continue to learn from their parents. And equally important for me, I felt most of their parents were very different from mine. They were mostly people who didn't have to survive through the years during and after the last Civil War. Their idea about the world might have started out more open than my parents' when they came to this country. So many assumptions I had about Chinese people, about their beliefs, about their attitudes have both gone through a re-examination, resulting in some being disavowed, others confirmed, and still others suffering no concrete conclusion.

I felt that in addition to learning Chinese and Mandarin, in addition to learning Chinese culture and the changes the country has been going through, I understood better what changes my family had undergone that affected my own attitudes and my own ability to adapt to this new country in which I have lived much longer than the one I have left behind and yet whose shadow had continued to this day been cast in every path I have chosen or taken.

Northern Slope

The hail has turned to rain by now, but the droplets felt just as cold and biting on the skin, on the face, the fingers, those worn out fingers. He was wearing a thin, long sleeve shirt, also worn out, with a lot of holes and patches his wife had sewn on. His son was bored, chipping away the plaster on the wall with increasing reluctance but dared not complain. The boy was only seven, and he was more interested in staying in their hut than being in the cold. He didn't understand why they had to do this, why now, chipping away plaster from a wall.

Prakash was the man's name. He could have been born under different circumstances, to a different family, to a different caste, a different country, perhaps. But he was here, as his destiny had dictated. He was here with his son, Vishnu, whose destiny was also written before birth as dictated by the previous life. Prakash will try to be good this life, not knowing exactly what he did wrong in the last. He was chipping away the plaster of the walls on this old house so that a new layer could be put on later. With the help of the seven-year old's hands, they could finish this by the end of the day, and tomorrow, when it stopped raining, hopefully, he could put on a new layer of plaster. He had never paid attention to this old house, which was only 15 minutes walk from his hut.

The house is situated at the foothills of the northern slope of the mountain locals call Rohtang. It was an old mansion owned by a local Muslim business man before the British took over. The state government had decided to finally renovate the abandoned house and turn it into a tourist attraction since it was on the path for a lot of Westerners coming here to enjoy the Himalayas. Prakash had seen some of them, and he never stopped being dazzled by them, in more ways he could even understand himself. And yet, he understood at least that those aliens from afar lived their own lives, far removed from his, and he was looking at them not in very different ways from the way he looked at the lives and characters in a Bollywood movie. The reality, for him, was to help renovate this house, paid in pittance by the government but still much more than he had been earning. He was lucky to land the job; he accidentally helped one of the local mafia boss's sons back home after he had gotten lost trying to hike the area around here. He was grateful beyond measure for this opportunity to earn some money. It was a clear case of karma.

His own son, on the other hand, hated the experience of having to work in dirt. But it had little to do with his the arrival of the opportunity, but rather, it was a coincidence that he had turned seven, and his dad decided that it was time for him to help out the family. His brother, eleven, was already going to the market everyday, including days when there were two feet of snow, to sell potatoes the mother had been harvesting.

Today there was no rain. It's the summer, the start of the summer, the monsoon had arrived but its rain was freezing cold. Prakash finally told Vishnu to join him under the awning of what used to be the main entrance to the inner court. They both got out their Tiffens, which were metallic containers stacked on top of one another, each with a small serving of food inside. They were quiet as they wiped their dirty hands, tore off a piece of naan, and started grabbing the lentil before putting the whole thing in their mouths. There was also potatoes, chickpeas, and some spinach with cheese. The Tiffens were inside insulated containers, and so the food was plenty warm, but not for long, as the weather was very cold, even in the middle of June. Prakash looked at the northern slopes that disappear into the clouds so that none of the peaks were visible. There was a temple up there, in the clouds. He and Vishnu had gone up many times, along with the rest of the family. He looked at his youngest son, who was busy eating. His arms were tiny, hardly any muscles, but he would have to start carrying the broken bricks from the western corner so the masons can put new ones in later this week.

Prakash looked up the slope again. His eyes darkened a little. It was on that slope that he had helped the mafia boss's son get unlost. Perhaps the temple's god, the monkey god Hanuman, was looking out for him. But he wasn't sure. Up the road from the temple was a school. He would like Vishnu to be in school, but he had no money. It was a private school, the only real school worth going to, and besides, the much worse public school was very far away, so that the walking time alone would have been better used for working and getting family some income. Hanuman never sent any signs for him to take his son to school. Working here would get them some money, but not enough to send the boy to school up there, and the opportunity cost of sending him was even greater.

He wiped the last bit of sauce and food from all the Tiffens with his last bit of naan, and he took another look at Vishnu, who did not seem happy that with the end of lunch they would have to go back to chipping off plaster and removing broken brick in the freezing rain. But he would probably not have been happier in a school. Prakash was confused, but it was time to get back to work. He sighed at the northern slope, where the clouds have started moving more rapidly with the advance of the winds that surely would bring more rain.

Meat in the Sun

Every Sunday Dad goes out to the market and comes back with a piece of pork. My job was to slice it into thin piece before cooking it. I watch the thick piece of meat hanging at the kitchen door. In the sun its surface had started to dry out. I could smell it. It was a piece of raw flesh, and the smell, however bad it might be to some, was heavenly for me. I always looked forward to Sunday, to market day, when meat was available to us. I looked at it as if I was revering it. I'd never been to the section in the market where the pigs were slaughtered and whose parts were sold. I never avoided it, but I never got the curiosity to visit that section. I had seen fishermen sell fishes, and also snakes, frogs, eels, and other creatures they had caught or farmed. But never the pork. I've seen poultry, including little ones that farmers bought to raise. I've even been to the buffalo butcher. But pig butcher, I wasn't sure if it even existed. But it must have because every Sunday there was a piece coming back, and we all treated it like gold.

It wasn't time yet to start slicing the meat. It was hanging there because it was the only place with a hook, and we didn't want to leave it lying around. The reason was hiding somewhere. I looked around. There were many small hiding places where the enemy could be hiding, biding its time, ignoring its own hunger. I had never actually seen the cat. My Mother had tried to set traps using fish scrap, but it never bought it. We knew it existed somewhere because there had been at least two occasions when the meat, left on the counter, disappeared without a trace. It was humiliating and depressing to lose a whole piece of meat to a cat. That time we couldn't buy more meat even if we had the money; we had ration stamps that set basically a quota on how much we could consume.

I shooed away some big, iridescently green flies that started to enjoy the smell of this flesh in the sun as much as I did. I found a shady spot near the front entrance and sat on the floor. I looked around, wondering where the cat could be. I suppose it was a very clever cat then, having eluded the whole neighborhood's efforts to trap it. It had been stealing food a lot, and I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't spend more time chasing mice, of which we had many here.

I started to fall asleep in the early afternoon sun. I was trying not to doze off, guarding and admiring the meat as much as I was capable of. I turned to look at the TV tube that my uncle had extracted from a broken TV and converted it to an aquarium. In it I had some colorful fish. I looked down and saw in a red bucket next to the aquarium were two helpless turtles that tried as much as they wanted to get out of their state. They weren't pets; my Dad knew the fish guy that spends most of day fishing and trapping aquatic creatures. These were even more special than the meat and they would be part of a soup. I didn't really care for it; the soup tasted strange and I preferred to have the meat.

I turned to look at the kitchen again, and for a second I had this vision that the meat was gone. My heart raced like a madman for a split second. But the sun's rays had shifted and the meat was no longer in the shade. That was why I missed it for a moment. I would be in such trouble if the meat had disappeared. I was always getting into some trouble, and being incompetent and letting the cat steal the meat would be a big deal.

The gate into this community was heard open and shut. I stood up and walked to the walkway to see if it was my Dad returning. But suddenly I saw a flash of a shadow, a light brown shadow, from the corner of the kitchen, disappearing somewhere behind the doors. There were many places to hide in this place that didn't have much to offer, no pipes, no storage boxes, nothing. But I knew what it was. The stealth that caught me by surprise. I looked up and was relieved again to see that the meat was still there. The thief had come really close this time. I have never seen a cat, but I was not entirely sure if a cat could jump up high enough to reach the piece of meat. There was nowhere else to hang the meat, so I just waited. Finally, my Dad was here, he would figure everything out!

Cow on the First Night

I remember the feeling, so familiar, of being at an unfamiliar place at night. Everything had the same color but everything looked different from one second to the next. I remember also the smell, which also changed too from one place to another. By the time we reached the hotel my brain was already flooded with too much information to sleep with.

There was a cow, however. Or a bull. It didn't matter. It was suddenly like in a safari.

That was fifteen minutes before. Now I was sitting, dazed, in an air-conditioned room, away from the heat that I had to be in for the past thirty minutes. The heat. It was after the dusk, and it was still stiflingly miserable outside. I was inside a motorized rickshaw, and "auto", as they called it there. The madman that was our driver whizzed through the night time traffic that no New Yorker on the busy Cross Bronx Expressway would dare to do, however much they were in a hurry. The speed of the auto generated, obviously, a lot of wind for me, but it was hot wind. And with the myriads of smell and stink in the wind, I felt like I was swimming in the madness of a thick soup.

We were going too fast for me to hear any particular sound, so the sound became a soup too, like the smell and the images. The motion was a soup, as we oscillated erratically between sudden speedups and near crashing stops. Still, none of this was particularly new. I've been to many countries with these kinds of soupy experience. Even at night, sometimes it was raining; here, there was no rain, and there would not be any rain for a long time.

But then, there was a cow, or a bull. What was it? I didn't bother to check. I've seen cows before, in different countries, but never in a city. I screamed loud enough for the auto driver to hear and stop, almost throwing me out of the rickshaw. He thought something was wrong, and his Hindi was too fast for me to understand. But I didn't really want to understand and he didn't need an explanation when he saw me come out of his auto, pointing at the cow we had passed. He laughed, and signaled that I should get back in so he could reverse. He was amused. He was a young man whose name I can't recall now. He was probably from some nearby village driven here by equal measures of economic desperation and greed. He didn't own the auto, of course, but he made more money than lots of other people from the village. He was tired, undoubtedly from the day's work, but he was amused and saw this interaction between the foreigner and the cow as a nice, light diversion for his day's work before retiring to some cheap moonshine that would accompany, obviously, his story of a foreigner and a cow.

The cow. Let's suppose it was a cow. Most creatures were cows, few bulls, for some reason. She stood there, next to a huge pile of garbage mixed with dug up sewage. It was in front of a building with two restaurants. I was told that they were Muslim restaurants. I was told that we were in the Muslim district. The locals instantly got interested at the incident of a stopped auto with a foreigner, one of the few, if any, in the city now, probably the only one in this Muslim neighborhood. The spectacle was too irresistible. Within minutes there was crowd of people chatting and watching the cow whisperer.

Not really. I couldn't get close to the creature. The stench of the garbage and the dug out sewage in this stifling day with no wind was too overpowering for me. I have never stood in front of not only a cow in a city but such repulsive display of human jettison. I was warned that there were cows everywhere, that there was dug out sewage (eventually to be burned) scattered everywhere just like garbage was. This wasn't a city, I had been told before arriving, but just a huge village where thousand-year old infrastructures were still in place for a modern country with laptops and wireless Internet connections everywhere. I had to see it to believe it; I couldn't accept it.

Here I was, standing in front of a cow, which was not in anyway bothered by my staring or the ring of crowd of human creatures whose center she shared with the starer. She masticated the edible parts of the garbage quickly but effortlessly. Her left horn was chipped. There was a dark trail of something dry running down her right eye, which was red. Her skin was full of bruises. It was sinful to harm a cow, let alone kill it, but people did this frequently, especially when a cow attempted to steal vegetables. Eating garbage could only get you so far in your natural desire to be healthy.

I stood about two meters away, listening to the cow, listening to the chatter around me. But I was also noticing the different smells. It wasn't only the stink of the sewage waiting to be burned or the garbage waiting to be picked through by the beast in front of me. It was food. I smelled grease, hot grease somewhere; I smelled sweets; I smelled meat, and being in a Muslim area there was beef, no doubt; I smelled life, people living, people laughing, people thinking, people worrying. The smell of humanity, good and bad, comprised a complicated array of emotions and behaviors. I took a look at the people around me and the cow. Most of them shied away with an embarrassed smile when my eyes met theirs. They were, if I can remember correctly, all men. No women were there, or if they were, they were probably wearing all black, covering from head to toe (but not the face), and in the darkness that would be easy to miss. Some faces stood defiant, unwilling to shy away from the ridiculous foreigner who wanted to flaunt his stupidity by watching a cow. Maybe he started to resemble the cow, standing so still, hardly even moving his head. I was for them as much of an attraction as the cow was for me.
I turned and the people's gazes, I could feel, followed me back to the auto. The auto driver, being quite proud to be the conveyor of this night time entertainment for these fellow citizens of his that he probably did embrace too much as a Hindu, waved the people off and screamed some quick Hindi at them before squeezing himself into this little seat. The sound of the motor burst out again as the chattering of the dispersing circle of people started to thin out. I thought a little more of the cow that moment. And I thought a little more again in the air conditioned room when I was looking out the window, staring at the old, dilapidated palaces from the old Muslim empire that set its capital here. I thought about the invariance of time I saw in that cow. It was marked by the brutal events of time in which she had been alive so far, but her eyes, her nonchalance, her total lack of curiosity in me, a novelty to everyone else, made me think about a clock that had stopped. And a sudden chill of sadness overwhelmed me, and that chill would stay with me in the remainder of my stay in this city still trapped in some time hole, moving neither forward nor could it regress any further.

Counting Pennies, Almost

He could be a veteran. He was very tall, his hair all shaggy and time has dusted it all with grayness. He's wearing a nondescript hat that pleaded allegiance to no sports team, no company, not entirely even to any entity. It was so wrinkled and worn out that it might not be of any particular type of hat. He was very tall, tallest person in the supermarket, and he towered over the small, black cashier whose cashier screen he was staring very intently at.

"That ain't right. The candies, the food, the milk, they are all under food stamp. The cat treats I gave you a two-dollar coupon. So why are you charging me $4.25 still? That ain't right. You did it wrong. Get someone to come here," he said, without looking at the much shorter and smaller woman in front of him, his lips quivering a little, his whole body a little shaky. He was wearing a light cotton jacket, as worn out as his cap, as faded, as tired as his face. His face, a marvel to look at. So many wrinkles and yet, despite the grayness of his relatively long hair, you know he's not that old. Like the hair, the face has been weathered by more than just time, but times of many ordeals. On the right side of his neck is a tattoo that remained unmoving. It was a dagger with embellishments around it. The design remained in some ways the most solid part of his existence but also its possible history invoked some sense of a lost strength and confidence. And what a contrast to his eyes now, which were trying to be defiant, trying to stick to his claim that the cashier must have made an error and that he shouldn't be paying so much for what he was buying. But deep down he felt the shame of having to fight over two dollars that he believe she had made a mistake over. He was flustered, somewhere in his buried soul, about the meaning of those two dollars for an unemployed man who once did something much grander than that measly amount.

His cats would enjoy those treats. But now he had to fight for those treats, for he actually couldn't afford to pay $4.25 for those treats, which was why he used the coupons. He heard the customer behind him, another black, short woman, but older than the cashier, tell another customer that "candies shouldn't be under food stamps." He said nothing. It was his way of having the government pay for a small pleasure of his when it had failed to pay anything else back for his efforts. He kept quiet because he was fighting just this one front; he needn't open another one; the cashier and that opinionated customer weren't allies even though they were the same race.

A white woman came over, a manager, and started asking what the problem was. He had to explain again, his voice remained loud but quivering. The woman didn't look at him, as he didn't look at her. She was a short, overweight woman who had to deal with all this customer related issues whole day every day. It was not even noon yet.

She punches the keys on one of the little machines connected to the cashier machine, looking very busy and displaying her confidence in the resolution of a problem that seems to be as complex as it is unreal. The only thing truly calm here, and not even the customers waiting on the growing line were calm, was the tattoo on the man's neck. It stood its ground, still, not bothered, a relic of a past that will forever be immutable. The man's voice became softer as he continued to repeat his mantra that he wouldn't be paying $4.25 for his cat snacks. He finally shut up when the manager accepted his $2.25 and let him have everything and leave.

The man, towering above everyone and yet feeling like the only dwarf in the store, grabbed his bags of food and the cat treat, and with a slight limp, he wanted slowly out the door. He could hear the black customer behind him complaining again that candies should not be covered by food stamps. The automatic doors opened, welcoming him back out to the real world where problems would often be a lot less easy to resolve than the two-dollar discrepancy. The sun was shining and the weather was warming up. He could see still some traces of the snow, now all darkened, at various corners of the parking lot. And when he took another step, he was slightly startled by the closing of the automatic doors. He felt a little excluded; he dared not turn around and look at the people behind him, lest they weren't looking at him at all.

Papas Bravas

He had never measured out the salt before, and so when he did it this time for the first time, he was astonished by how much salt he needed. The large sea salt grains bounce off the cup of the kitchen weight, making a sounds reminiscent of people pouring raw rice into a container. That was what he thought. Working with food, the most basic sustenance besides air and water, and unlike those two life-sustaining elements, food opens the door to creativity as well as a myriad of gastronomical enjoyments. And so the sound of the salt grains was very pleasing and familiar to him even though he had never associated it with salt before.

It was a good half a cup of salt that he measured out; a quarter the weight of the little new world potatoes he was going to cook with. The little potatoes were already sitting in a pot of water, waiting to be baptized further with this salt. After pouring the salt in the water, he waited for the water to boil, at which point he covered the pot with a kitchen towel before putting on the lid. Then suddenly the kitchen is quiet again, and adventure of preparing food and seeing the water go through its rage ended. The fire had been lowered. The timer was then set for twenty five minutes.

He sat there, in the quiet kitchen, and thought about the potatoes. He felt a chill in this heated house. It wasn't from a draft seeping through the window somewhere. The blizzard had come and gone, and the snow left behind was now being extinguished by the warming weather. No, the chill didn't come from the outside. It came with the wind of his memories.

The potatoes. This was a Spanish recipe. There were many other ways potatoes were prepared in Spain. He remembered one, one so-called papas bravas, brave potatoes from Barcelona. It was a chilly but sunny day. It was winter in the Catalonian capital. The tall birch trees were all naked, extending their branches to the sky like the veins on the sculptures of saints raising their hands upwards in praise of their God. There were nonetheless many tourists roaming around in this neighborhood he could not possibly remember the name of. But there was a big boulevard, not the big one they call Las Ramblas, but another one, that ended, if he recalled correctly, at a market that was under renovation, like so many things were in this old city trying to keep its economy going afloat at the eve of the recession that has still not released its grip. Was it not that long ago?

He was sitting there, in the chilly air, with his old jacket on. He was standing outside this eatery with a crude painting of a dolphin outside. Was it the name of the eatery in Catalan? Dolphin? He was alone. He wondered what he was doing there. He had spent the last hour looking for a place to eat, but they were either all full or closed (as in, not yet open). Now that he found a place that seemed to have empty chairs and open, he stood there dubious.

Why? As he was sitting now in the comfort of his own home, the familiarity of his own kitchen, and beholding another culinary adventure, he wondered in the silence of his own dominion, why he was so doubtful, so hesitant, standing there. He got up to heat up some water, perhaps semi-consciously he wanted to warm up, to counter the chilly thought. It was cold. He didn't have his gloves on, he recalled. He had his camera, his backpack, but no hat and no gloves. He sat back down and water for the water to boil. Now the silence is slowly being intruded by the sound of the kettle, the rattling of its bottom by the increasing number of bubbles. He couldn't see the bubbles as the kettle was made of metal, but he imagined they were getting more and more numerous.

He imagined. That day, about 1PM somewhere in the Catalonian capital, he imagined what it was like to go inside, sit down, and order. What would he order? He was hesitant. He could speak Spanish, and they would speak Spanish back to him regardless of what their native tongue was. So what was the problem?

He put his head on his crossed forearms on the kitchen counter, at which he was sitting. He wasn't trying to remember, he was amused and savoring the artificial chill air coming from his insides. The potatoes. They led him to this moment in his life that otherwise seemed so insignificant. He had traveled to so many places before that moment, and of course, afterwards too. Why that moment? He looked up and rested his chin on the forearms. The rattling was becoming louder, and very soon the whistle would blow and he would have to get up to take the water off the stove. He got up and opened the door to the pantry. There he took out a container of Chinese loose tea. He opened it and took a whiff, still smelled intense. He looked at the time and it was just a little past noon, in fact, not so different from when he was standing in front of the eatery with a dolphin painted on the front.

With one hand holding the container, he closed the pantry door behind him and walked to the section of the kitchen counter closest to the stove. He looked at the pot with the potatoes hidden inside. He understood why it was not making any noise. The kitchen cloth he had used muffled all sounds. Steam could be seen slowly rising out of the little hole of the mouth of the kettle. He set the metallic container of tea down and reached for the teacup that already came with a filter. Preparing tea was something he had been doing everyday for many years, since before he went to Barcelona that time. And while his hands were preparing the tea, his mind, bringing back more of that chill, went back to the place in front of the dolphin painting.

He was hesitant, almost wanted to leave. He couldn't imagine walking in there alone, and having to brace himself for a conversation, however short, in a foreign language. He might be made fun of.

Yes, he might be.

Not really because of any feature about him, not because he wasn't white like most Spaniards, not because he was a tourist toting a big camera, and not because he would certainly have an accent in his orders for food. Because he was alone and somehow, he never felt he belonged there. He was alone then as much as he was alone in the kitchen now. The week he had been in Barcelona he had realized that people there were rarely alone. They were always with someone or some people. They either had friends or family with them. Even the tourists, most of whom were Spanish, were always in a group or with a significant other. This, he remembered now, was what accentuated his loneliness in the city, and it was this loneliness, almost to the point of shamefulness, that prevented him from going into eateries and enjoying himself. It was almost always like this, the sensation almost always followed up, the loneliness, the inability to share his ideas and feelings with anyone. In this city, it was even harder when he was surrounded by people who were never alone.

Just the day before he was getting his haircut, and the barber, who was, actually, alone, took no time to start talking to him. They had a knack for connecting with people, strangers, included. They had a knack to embrace others, it seemed, and for this reason, he felt a mixture of shame as well, shame that he never could bring himself to connect with someone and become part of something human. He only wanted someone, it seemed, so that he could be saved from loneliness, whereas people here, it seemed, became part of something because it was so natural.

So he stood there, feeling the dread of entering yet another eatery, yet again alone. He felt his soul taking a step back. He could imagine his body following it and leaving this place. He saw that there was no bar inside, the one place he had learned to hide from the shame of loneliness. He would have to sit at a table, alone. He turned to look at the boulevard full of people braving the chilly wind, some taking pictures. He walked away from the door a little, so as not to be seen strange lingering in front of the eatery like that.

The whistle started to scream very loud very quickly. He lifted it up and poured some hot water into the empty teacup. Then he waited for the teacup to warm up. He wrapped his two hands around the body of the cup and waited until it was no longer bearable. Then he lifted the teacup and walked over to the sink, pouring the warming water out. By now the remaining water in the kettle was cooled enough for green tea. He took the teaspoon already sitting by the tea container, and got a brimming full of the brownish tea leaves, and dumped it in the filter of the teacup. Then in he poured the hot water before putting the lid on it. He looked at the clock on the wall and mentally made a note about when he would have to remove the tea: three minutes later.

He turned around and looked at the dolphin painting again. So innocent. The people in there couldn't be mean, couldn't be laughing at him if he were to go in there. They were business people. Maybe. But he was sensitive. Then he looked down and saw what they were offering today for lunch. The word "Papas bravas" caught his eyes, but not because it was something he had read a few days ago as a regional specialty, but rather, the word "bravas" made him feel a little less cold. He wasn't sure if it actually meant brave, in which case it made no sense for potatoes, or if it simply meant good or great. But either way, those two words made him feel warmer.

After he took out the filter along with the tea leaves inside, he sat back down and started sipping the tea. It was very warming. He smiled. He understood why those two words warmed his insides up a little that day. Yes, he liked the sound of "brave"; that was what traveling had always done for him, bring out the bravery in him, or at least made him a little braver. But then, he remembered he really wanted to know what "papas bravas" looked and tasted like. What could you do with potatoes that you can have so many different recipes? He wondered. He remembered wondering about it. And his almost dead heart, dying from the dread of being singled out as the loneliest man on earth, started racing. He was becoming excited about finding out what this local specialty was like.

The price to pay for traveling was always for him that loneliness, that desperate desire to connect with someone. But it had always been a worthwhile price to pay for experiencing life. These brave potatoes were waiting for him like soldiers of a new country waiting for him, a country ravaged by war, so full of uncertainties, but also so interesting. He was perhaps a reporter from outside, meeting the tired but brave soldiers guarding the border.

Sipping his warm, slightly bitter tea he imagined that metaphor as he recall how he decided to take that step over the threshold of the eatery's door and walk into a very sunny room full of empty chairs as well as people. Few took notice of his grand entry, but those who did smiled at him. And as soon as he sat down, a middle-aged waiter with a quintessential mustache put knife and fork next to his plate, and asked how he was doing. So the adventure began. The excitement of tasting some new potatoes had built up into a roaring crescendo. He remembered that he was happy sitting there. He even chitchatted with the waiter, about the chilly weather, no doubt.

He put his cup of tea down and savored a moment of complete silence. The rattling had long gone. The pot pregnant with little potatoes immersed in super-salted water made no sound, no grumbling. This was a Spanish dish he had tried multiple times when he was in Spain, and he was making it now, if not for its flavor, at least for the memory of many brave steps he took traveling alone in this world.

Undercoat Fruits

"Hold the bus!" the man hollered. Then he repeated. And repeated. In the near darkness, where the weak street lamps were beginning to outshine the last vestige of twilight, the man with three legs were hollering.

Who was he talking to?

Anyone. But no was paying attention. I turned to look at the bus he was screaming at, or about. Then I realized he had been hollering for a while, probably since he saw the bus from the corner down the street. He couldn't run. He used his third leg to propel himself as quickly as possible. I saw that there were people sitting and the last person of the line into the bus had just got in the bus.

Should I stop the bus? I wondered. I wasn't even taking that bus. What would I say to the bus driver? A man with a cane is yelling for you to not drive a way? No one was paying heed to the three legged man's holler. I was at the point of helping, or I convinced myself that I was about to do that, when the bus door closed, its left signal started blinking, and the man's renewed cry was quickly drowned out by the roaring of the engine of this piece of public transportation.

The three-legged man was still quite a few paces away; it would have taken him another two minutes to get to the bus, two precious minutes that I doubt anyone, not the least the bus driver, had patience for. When the man stood next to me, looking at the distant bus that eventually disappeared in the lights of downtown, I recognized him. I didn't know who he was, but I knew he was one of the panhandlers I often saw around downtown. He had had a problem with his leg for as long as I had lived here. He was balding, his face a little disfigured from some event unknown to me, and he was developing a hunchback. He sat near me, about three people away. I braced myself for the usual homeless people smell, but I got nothing. He didn't really notice me, didn't look at me; he was catching his breath.

A few minutes later the sky was completely dark, and the man was somewhat of a concrete shadow sitting close to me. He would be waiting for another twenty minutes or so. My bus would come in about six minutes.

Then, out of the blue, the shadow with the cane started singing. It was a sweet, Southern song, at least it sounded like it, sounded like something black people would say in the south, a chorus of soul-searching black people with their stentorian voices praising the Lord. Maybe it was Gospel music. But I don't know. Maybe it was just my assumption based on the fact that he was a black man. His voice was clear, and I wondered why he didn't sing when he panhandled; I would imagine people would be more willing to give him some money.

The song was about a river that flowed in front of his house. Well, maybe not his house, but the house of the voice of the song. It was a swampy river, slow moving. There were birds and it was the evening, when the last bit of twilight had disappeared. It was, unlike now, very hot and humid, and the swamp started singing too.

Then his pocket started glowing, as if a flashlight just lit up inside. I didn't want to stare, but it was filling my head with imaginations. Maybe it was a bottle full of fireflies, the kinds you find in the summer, maybe where there were swamps. And I could have sworn that the light inside his pocket was moving even though.

Two more minutes left and my bus should be here.

His tune changed, and it became a sadder song. It was about some woman who never wrote back to him. She was from another town hours of bus ride away. And he only had the memory of the gardenias outside her little shack when he visited her that one time. The light in his pocket was glowing ever brighter. Was I the only one who noticed this? But even more, at this bus stop, surrounded by bare elm trees and no other vegetation, I started smelling something strong. Did a woman walk by with some strong perfume? No. People who took the bus in this sad town didn't put on anything but second-hand clothing from the Salvation Army. Besides, all this time I didn't notice any other creatures moving. No one joined us to wait for the bus, even though a lot of buses stopped here. Not even passersby. I wondered if that was the scent of gardenias; I have heard about them, but I don't even know what they smell like, or looked like. But this fellow told me; in his song he said she had the whitest teeth when she smiled, as white as the gardenias that still lingered in his mind. I started thinking about Ray Charles; he would sing a song like this, though I've never heard this song before.

The bus is late. It's a minute late. Typical. I don't know why I even keep track of time.

I sighed and shook my head at the predictability of the city's unpredictability. Then the singing stopped. I turned my head a little and realized he was looking at me, smiling. I was a little creeped out at first. The amber mercury light cast on his face made him look even more sinister than usual. I never really looked at his face when I bumped into him and hear him asking for change. He was one of the half dozen panhandlers in the downtown area, it was their place of employment so to speak. At first I looked away, but he said to me, "Hey Mister, you know what a jubaloo is?"

I turned to him, with my mind a little distracted by the hope that the bus would show up now. I saw his eyes this time. Dark, deep. There's a scar cut almost perpendicular to his right eye straight in the middle. Not too deep, barely noticeable, and not at all if you were just getting on your way ignoring his plead for money. Actually, it never really sounded like a plea, just like any innocent question so that "You got change for the homeless?" sounded just like "You know that water is a liquid at room temperature?" I noticed that his whiskers around his lips and on his chin were mostly gray. His face had a lot of freckles on. And when he spoke again, I noticed his lips, all chapped, and his teeth, revealed when he started smiling, very yellow and some were missing. "I'll show ya!" He dipped his hand into that pocket with the light glowing inside. The light didn't come out when he pulled his hand back out. And when he opened his palm there was a perfectly round ball inside, mostly yellow with some hint of red, though it's hard to distinguish the colors in this light.

"What's that?"

"Jubaloo! That's what you find in the swamps, a wild fruit. I never seen the tree but once a while, when the temperature is just right and the rain come just the right time, green flowers glow in the swamps like stars at night!"

"Green flowers? You mean leaves?" I thought.

"And if the right temperature come the right time after that with the right amount of rain and the right kind of bees, this fruit come burstin' out!"

"And how often does that happen?"

"I don't know. I've only experienced it once! They say it only happens once in a lifetime!"

I frowned. He laughed

He understood my bewilderment. He saw my incredulity. He continued, "That was nine years ago!"

"So the fruit can last nine years? This jumaboo?" I asked.

"Jubaloo. It can but only if you have the light," he said, at which point he pointed to his glowing pocket. "It doesn't need the light all the time, just sometimes. You would know when it needs it. It gets sad when he doesn't get enough light."

"Sad?"

"You just know when it's sad. If you are fortunate to witness the birth of the fruit, you are connected to it! And you can feel it, even though it's just a fruit!"

"And what is that light?"

"It's the light from the swamp. But it only glows so you can remove it, and then it stops glowing until you believe in it."

"Believe in it?"

"It is fueled by your belief in something. It will glow when you believe in something."

"Something?"

"Yeah, man. Something. It doesn't have to be the same thing; it doesn't have to be true for anyone else."

"And what did you believe in now that it is glowing?"

"I first believed, wanted to believe, that someone would stop the bus. Even though it didn't stop for me, I realized you wanted to stop it for me, but you were too late," he said, looking at me. "Then I believed that you would like my song, that it would make you believe in things too, like the smell of gardenia, love, life, whatever!"

As his face started glowing, so did his pocket. It was odd. It was incredible. I took one last look at the fruit; it was perfectly round, and somehow I believed it was sweet, sweet like nectar, sweet like memories of joy, sweet like hope. And it was at this moment that my bus finally came. The light of the stairs to the bus came on as the door was swung open. No one came up, and though I couldn't see the expression on the face of the driver, I knew I was being beckoned. I turned to take one last look at the panhandler, who smiled at me and didn't take his eyes off me before I looked away. In the bus, after paying my fare and sitting down by the window, I looked out, but the brightness of the bus, aided even more by the tint of the window pane, I couldn't make him out in the bus stop. I think I saw a glow, maybe the glow from his pocket, and in my mind I feel like I could see that fruit, then see the swamp he was singing about, the ivory teeth of the smile of the woman never to be seen again, and I wondered where my hopes and beliefs were flying off to.

Fifteen Dollars of Fun

He looked at his watch again, and then at the clock on the wall adjacent to the one he is leaning against, and they both told him that he had been there for only thirty minutes. Still, his heart sank because he felt he had been there for an eternity.

He turned to his left and walked as carelessly as he could so as not to betray the boiling caldera in his heart. He reached the table of fruits and cheeses. There were just a few more bunches of grapes left, and instead of cheese, there was a nearly empty container of hummus for the little bread that was left. People had already devoured the snack bar, or was it him, who had been too nervous to dance and instead of cruising around the dance floor he had been eating? He tore off a piece of bread and wiped a bit of the hummus with it before stuffing it between his lips. Where was the water? But he had been drinking water the whole time, and in between he was either standing or going to the bathroom. Anything except what he had come for: dancing.

He coughed out $15 at the entrance before entering the dimly lit ballroom. There were red curtains waiting for him, draping loosely over the arches between the dance floor full of people in an even darker space and the socializing area where people were eating and pretending to pay attention to the stranger talking to them about their lives or opinions about something that just couldn't reach the sanctums of the listener's consciousness. There were many old women sitting at the tables they have reserved for themselves, even though customarily these tables weren't reserved for anyone. Then there were the old men trolling around looking for any desperate new and very young dancers to put their paws on. And he was the only young man standing there not knowing what to do.

Whenever the set of songs ended and most people from the dance floor thanked their partner before scurrying off the dance floor, he would feel his heart throbbing to what he thought must have been a physiologically dangerous point. Suddenly all these women were now looking for someone to dance with, and he couldn't make himself look available. He would either still have a piece of cheese in his finger tips or felt a deep need to go to the bathroom. No woman coming off the dance floor made eye contact with him. And how could they? Most knew other people, other men, and they would just as quickly go back on the dance floor with the new guy. That made his heart sink. He felt even more incompetent than when he came in. Not only as a dancer, but as a man.

Where was anyone? He thought people from his classes would show up, at least one! But none! He felt alone in his most formidable challenge in his life: dancing with someone for the first milonga, or dance party, in his life. He didn't dare to look at the direction of the old women who would be lucky to dance once tonight and when he walked by them to busy himself with something, he would make a point not to look at any. He would be chewing something, anyway.

During the 30 minutes he was there there had been three changes of dance partners, the last having just happened now. And through each break he experienced the same ordeal: heart throbbing and then heart sinking. He had his eyes on a few young women he thought weren't great but probably wouldn't reject his offer to dance, but they always seemed busy, either intercepted by someone, seemed busy with food, or disappeared into the bathroom.

He decided that if he didn't succeed the next break, he would just leave.

The next ten minutes, which was how long a set of songs usually take, felt even more agonizing than the thirty minutes that have just passed. He tried to look cool, because he knew that from time to time the women on the dance floor looked and he wanted to maintain an air of self-confidence. After the third and final song was about to finish, he made sure he had nothing in his mouth, fixed his face so it was smiling, and put on the makeup called smile on his lips.

Finally, the music was finished, and the brief music that signals the break and change of partner came on. Again, his heart started to throb like a wild stallion. He set his eyes on this girl just a little shorter than him. She was rather pretty, but since she kept dancing with incompetent looking men he thought he deserved a shot with her. With a smile that was somehow frozen on his face, he started to approach the woman. She looked annoyed coming off the dance floor. He froze. Maybe she had a bad dance and now she was just in a foul mood. But it didn't matter; he paid the entrance fee and so he had to dance at least one dance! He dragged his feet slowly towards her, who had gone to the snacks table and tried to figure out what she could eat.

He walked up to her and managed to utter a hello between the lips that were his smile. She looked at him for a split second and said hi back, not smiling, fake or real. He felt his shoulders, his chest, his pelvis, all draw inwards, so that his whole torso seemed to be concaving as all his courage was muffled by the collapse of his body. She was clearly not smiling at him, not enjoying seeing him.

He quickly picked up a cup and pretended to look for the marker fervently so he could put his initials on the cup. All this time he couldn't look at her; too busy with the concavity of his body. And when he sensed that a man was approaching her his heart sank. He knew that he could just quickly ask her, but he couldn't imagine her accepting his request. He heard the man asking her to dance, and she refused him. On the one hand he felt relieved that he didn't ask her and got thrown into the well the way that man must have felt. But on the other hand, he just lost his chance. She walked away without a word and that left him feeling a bit cold. Of course, he didin't say much either.

And so he drank down the water in the cup now marked with his initials, and then he went to the chair where he had sat down to change his shoes. He felt a little upset that he had paid $15 to just get zero dance. But then he felt relieved that at least it was over and that his ego could rest in peace knowing that tonight it won't be getting a beating.

Cupcake at the Corner

He had spooned the frosting on all the dark brown cupcakes, and a little was left. The countertop is all dirty with patches of flour, some mixed with some liquid so they resembled also patches of cement. There were also patches of sugar and cocoa, often overlapping one another. The measuring cups were in various locations of the countertop, next to a mixing bowl here and there. Measuring cups still with a mixture of dairy products resembling different paint used by an artist just now on his palette.

There was still some left. Some frosting, as mentioned. So he squirted some directly into his mouth. That was the most decadent part of the product of his hour-long toil before his work went in the oven. He felt almost like a potter, now waiting for the transformation of his work in the kiln to complete. He had been peeking into the oven in which a light illuminated the progress of his work, the chocolate cupcakes that grew and changed shape. But the best part, the simplest part, was whipping up the frosting. And to be able to eat the leftover was the best reward for his hard work.

Almost the best reward. The best reward was to see the smile on the woman he wanted to impress. He brought four of the cooled cupcakes in a Rubbermaid container, set it on the countertop, grabbed his coat and put it on, then got the container in his arms, and walked out with his keys. After closing behind him, he observed the outside. It was late afternoon and the first green buds of the branches just started to show themselves, after most of the flowers have blossomed and wilted away.

Meet at the corner.

So he did. He walked down the block, where only two weeks ago there was a thin blanket of snow covering it. That was where she told him to make the cupcakes and that they would meet at the corner. In two weeks! Because she was away for two weeks. How anxious and impatient he had felt during those two weeks. He had lost a lot of sleep. He even rehearsed the recipe first, giving most of the cupcakes away to friends and family, who thought it was really odd of him to be making cupcakes, but didn't complain as they were at least decent. Two weeks after she had told him her request on their snowy walk down this very street, he was prepared. She had returned from her trip and reminded him that it would be two weeks in a few days. He was very nonchalant in his response but deep down his heart was racing, very happy that it wasn't just some impulsive demand that really reflected nothing substantial.

Here, at the corner of Greenburg and Lexington, a quiet place where few cars pass, the corner of two streets lined with old Victorian style houses with a small strip of green land around each. Facing him as he stood at the corner was a big red house with gray roof tiles. The house was most red on its doors, but the facade was of a grayish red too. He had seen very often the old lady that lived on the first floor of the big house. She had this little dog that she walked every morning, but he saw her and that dog when he started out to work and saw only their return. He wondered what the woman was doing now. But the time was passing and have passed the hour they were supposed to meet. The slight hint of green of the street momentarily distracted him. Spring was a time to make people feel hopeful, that new things would happen. So he gave himself a boost of energy to wait.

From the corner of his right eye he could see her coming. His heart started racing at incredible speeds. He pretended not to see her coming. In fact, he looked in the direction away from her, pretending to observe the yellow house with blue doors. By now he could hear her steps. She actually came! What did this mean? He couldn't contain himself and he nearly dropped the cupcakes.

Her voice called out and he turned and pretended to look surprised. He could smell her perfume before he could get a hug from her, a hug he wanted to stay longer than it did but it was longer than he had hoped for.

"So those are for me?" she asked innocently, also pretending, like him, to be lacking of emotions.

Yearning at Night

The cold wind can be heard knocking at the thin windows, but those aren't the windows inside the room where Yao is lying, awake and eyes wide open. His room has no windows. They've turned off the heat even before they have changed into their thin pajamas and crawled under their scratchy blankets. It's warm enough, however, and the mattress is comfortable enough. Here in a suburb of Beijing Yao lies awake far from his village two provinces away, separated from him with tall snow peak mountains. The wind reminded him of his days in the village situated in a valley that also gets a lot of wind in the winter. That village brings him a lot of memories, but he's realistic; those memories are gone. The village is also practically gone. It's very different now.

It's not the memories that have kept him awake. Maybe it's the fatigue. He worked nearly twelve hours today at the construction site an hour of bus ride away in one of the hotel zones of the Capital of the fastest growing country in the world. He reads the newspapers; he knows he is lending a hand in that progress. But his fatigue is quite unbearable. And yet, it's not just the fatigue that has kept him awake. He wanted to get up and get a smoke. He could afford better cigarettes now, and still send money home to that village that no longer existed in his mind, whose memories have vaporized by the dynamo of progress in the past ten years. He no longer slept on thin straw mattes over a brick bed connected to the furnace. He no longer ate meat bought with ration coupons given twice a month. But what's more, he didn't live like a frog at the bottom of a well, as the Chinese proverb goes. He is now in a big city, one not only of great progress but a lot of culture. He has still never stepped into a museum, didn't understand a lot of the advertisements that have replaced the old Communist slogans in his village, but he felt his life had become bigger. Sure, he had never worked as hard in his life, and the construction business was a dangerous one, much more than tilling the little bit of land given to them after the economic reform started fifteen years ago. One of his closest buddies became a paraplegic and someone he didn't know fell to his death, which was compensated by two year's worth of his salaries. Still, there were many of them, and he would have to be really unlucky to meet his doom so soon.

He doesn't want a cigarette now. He has smoked nearly a pack today, and he's getting tired of smoking it, sort of weird. That annoyance comes and goes.

He sits up in the darkness and listens to the wind a little more. About two hours ago, he was standing at the bus station with other construction workers. His face was worn down by the mud on his face that was a mixture of the construction dust and his day's worth of sweat. His eyes were sunken under the weight of the work he had done. He knew all this because he saw it in his comrades. He also saw in them his own worn out clothes, his astray construction helmet, and in one of each person's hands a lunchbox. It wasn't a lunch box to carry lunch to work, but the reverse. There were no wives here to cook lunch for them to bring to work, but rather using their ration coupons from the construction company they could buy a generous size of lunch, and with a few dimes more they could add a couple of nice pork buns. And each of them would eat only half and save the rest for dinner. On a weekend they would go out for a meal and drinks for dinner. It wasn't an entirely bad life if you could suffer through the exhaustion that could make you sleepy on the dangerous job.

Sitting up in the darkness, listening to the sound of the howling wind, and the occasion tinkling sound of snow hitting on the window panes, he thought about the bus. He thought about the looks on his comrade's eyes. How is it that he never has noticed them, how worn out their souls were, how defeated. He remembered that when he was a child his family bought their first mule, and they would work it till it could no longer walk by the end of the day. The emptiness behind that mule's eyes, he remembered as a child, chilled him. This time it didn't chill him, that emptiness, just saddened him because he knew he too bore that same burden behind his eyes.

When they were in the bus he could see a little more even though the light was very dim. It was the cheapest bus line, very uncomfortable chairs, very crowded, nearly all construction workers; this was partly because the construction companies cut deals with the cheap buses and allowed the workers to ride for free or at a steep discount. He never rode a bus for free in the village, but then.... He looked at the people around him as he stood there squeezed among the tired shirts soaked in sweat. Everyone reeked of the absence of energy from the machines and tools of the day. The stink was barely bearable. He had been doing this for two years now, this being his second construction job, but he never could get used to the crowded pooling of sweat in the air. He felt like he was drowning in it, with no surface to reach, and whenever the bus came to a halt, the whole bunch of standing people would sway like wheat stalks in the wind, leaning against the people in front of them and being leaned against from behind. Then there's the dread that more people would be allowed to squeeze in. From time to time someone would yell at the driver for letting more people squeeze in, but since people can't get killed merely by squeezing in a bus, as long as the door could close it was all right.

By the middle of the ride, people started getting off. Those were the lucky ones whose dormitory was closer. He wondered how they got those jobs. His dormitory was not only farther away, but he shares a room with fifteen other people, more than half of whom would be snoring at any given time. But tonight that wasn't the reason he couldn't sleep. He kept thinking about this boy that got on the bus at the middle of his ride. He wasn't wearing construction worker's clothes, but he was neither old nor some middle-aged woman, which comprise the rest of the usual bus riders. He was another young man, a little younger than him, like his brother who's still stuck in the village failing to secure a work permit to go to a big city. He had a small bag on his back, more like an improvised bag, much like the one he had when he came to the city. He had come illegally, in that he didn't have a residence permit as he hadn't secured a work permit yet. But unlike his younger brother, he saved up money for the transportation and risked it to find a job here where he knew no one and had to sleep in hidden places away from the watchful eyes of the public security officers until he could find a job. It was a scary few months, lonesome, trying. And he looked at the boy, saw his lost face, and knew he was on the same boat. That lost look smothering the bravery and conviction that motivated those little country legs, was too familiar to him. Bravery was what fueled his perseverance. Plus, he had a family to support, not just his parents and the cowardly brother, but his newly wed wife, who was taking care of his parents. Perhaps it wasn't just bravery, he thinks in the darkness, that propelled him to go into the big city. He didn't even bother with the capital of his province, but came all the way to the Capital. Perhaps it was also necessity. But maybe even curiosity of the world and boredom with the village. Boredom with a destiny he somehow believed must be alterable by the sheer will of his hands and heart.

He saw that boy, that young man who looked a like a boy under that imposed straitjacket of fear and despair. He knew no one or at least didn't know how to get to where he needed to go; that was the look. And he wondered what motivated that boy to be there. No, it's no mystery, his comrades have told him all the same stories; necessity and a bit of curiosity. Yet, when he saw him he could still trace some of his own innocence that lent a credibility of bravery in the summary motivation of his adventure. It was this connection, even sympathy, that made him, almost, want to talk to the young man who had come with nearly nothing on his shoulders. To be his big brother, to make his life easier.

But then he looked around and saw all the mirrors around him in the dark incandescent light of the bus illuminating from the head of the bus. He saw phantasmal visages that all looked the same, that all looked like his, all exhausted of life and soul. He felt suddenly very lonely. He couldn't remember the last time his wife wrote to him, but that was less because she has been writing less often and more because he has paid much less attention to her letters as the days ground on. He was just a machine, doing what his body could to make money for motivations that made little sense but never questioned. The sheer loneliness that the lives around him reflected on his life made him take a step back from the boy. He was still looking lost in the thinning crowd when Yao got off the bus.

Now he thought about him, that young man. And slowly, as the familiarly cold wind outside making familiar sounds, conjuring up the details of that young man's fears and despair, tears start to flow down his cheeks.

Stolen Embrace II

How strange the stories we hear and come to believe, and our reactions come late. He didn't say much, but he easily got his point across and in the process shook me with emotions that he believed needed. He said that he was sitting there at the 7th Ave E train station, facing the Queens Bound side. The train had just left and he was just sitting there.

I couldn't quite understand why she couldn't say more. It was over. It was a blur. I was just sitting there as the E train had left, her face, in my mind, melting among the other faces. A very blurred photograph. That was my ex before I met her. I didn't meet her that day, of course. That day, a long day, followed by many other long days, was a tough day. I felt shivers through my spine as I sat there, watching the silence between the different trains that had pulled in the station. I was late to work, but I would rather just jump in the train tracks before the silence there was broken. Broken like my heart.

He was walking through the passage way in Grand Central that is flanked by expensive boutiques and food stalls. He was inspecting the fresh fish of his favorite fish monger.

It had been a few months, probably four, since the E train stop. I was in that passage way, inside one of the shops, the tea shop, which is right next to the stall of the fishmonger. My heart was still mending but I was in better spirit. I was looking for an herbal tea that had no caffeine. All my teas were green so they were not for bedtime. A woman walked in, but I smelled her before I saw her. It was a slightly peachy scent, and that scent suddenly made me decide on this tea that I had never heard of. Not sure if it was because the unfamiliar scent drove me to select an unfamiliar tea, or that the color of the peach was the color of the tea. So I put my face over the sample of this tea and it was really good. She said that too, and upon hearing her voice, I looked up, only to quickly look away. Then I looked again. Ah, I knew her. What a small world! We had known each other since high school, but had stopped keeping in touch for the past few years, and only sporadically before that.

He sat almost across from this strange woman in the downtown bound Q train towards Chinatown. The woman, probably homeless, judging from her dirty, thick bundle of clothes wrapping around her, was incessantly sanding the floor of the subway train with the sole of her right shoe. She was mesmerized by the sound it created.

I didn't take a good look at her. She was a black woman, a slight heavy set. She held two bags in each hand and carried a bigger back on her back, all bags being made of plastic. Her eyes were closed and her lips parted slightly, but she didn't make any sounds. I felt Stephanie's hand grip mine a little tighter. She would get emotional like that; she didn't like human suffering, even though the woman a bench away from her didn't seem to be suffering. She was in some sort of trance, snuggled perfectly in that swooshy sound from the sole of her right foot. I wondered what she had been doing and what she would do next. And then through the tightened grip of Stephanie's hand, I wondered about Stephanie, if she would really join the volunteer groups she had mentioned so many times. I kept it to myself, but i felt that her pity of the helpless was just a way to make herself feel better.

The cloisters are a fortress-like building situated on the northernmost tip of Manhattan, north of the Washington Bridge. It is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He sat one of the lookout points where the Hudson River flowed slowly between the island and its out-of-town neighbors in New Jersey. Beside him was a woman in her late forties. Still beautiful, with a gracefulness that deserved many pages to describe.

I could see the Hudson River's glitter behind the silhouettes of joggers on this late summer day. It was a perfect day. I was with Stephanie, both were resting on our folded forearms as we chatted. As the sky blossomed slowly with the twilight that heralded the end of the day and the impending closing of the museum, I told Stephanie how much I liked her, that in reality I loved her. Those words came out with a mixture of sternness and fear. She smiled and leaned her head on against my right arm. That was enough for me; her silent response didn't really bother me.

And in the botanical garden I could only see roses on her face as I took a deluge of photos. Perhaps one of them included by accident the old man and the slightly younger woman he was with. I wasn't sure. There were so many people that day. Now he sat next to me, and he ended he tale by telling me that we were both waiting here in vain. Where our paths didn't intersect at least in his case he realized she wasn't really in love with him, just enjoyed his company. She was just biding her time, waiting for this man of her age to eventually commit and marry her. He had found out just the day before that she wouldn't be coming back. And when he saw me sitting here, he realized his mission today was to convince me that the woman I thought I knew would not showing up today, for no other reason than that we have inadvertently try to find each other this past year. And so we shared a common fate.

I looked at the watch and she was more than half an hour late. He sighed and told me, still not looking at me, that sometimes however impossible the magic trick done in your life is, you have to believe it before you can dissect it.

Stolen Embrace

The rain was falling but it almost felt like snow that was landing on my nose. It was a little cold, but strangely in a comforting way. Maybe it was the sound of rain that was comforting and yet I felt like I was in a blanket somewhere in a snowy country, safe in the warmth of some bed, or my jacket surrounded by the silence of the snowy landscape.

As in most rainy scenes, the surrounding was nearly black and white, as if I was living inside a Doisneau photograph. There's a lot of reflection but all pixelated because of the rain drops. Still, in this black and white world devoid of nearly all hues I felt a comfort.

An elderly man sits next to me. I couldn't tell him that the space was reserved. And why not? It seemed a little preposterous, a reserved seat on a public bench. Besides, he seemed interesting. He was wearing a funny hat, resembling what you find on old Germans or Swiss at least in pictures. His eyes were deep, and it was like the cover of a book detailing his thoughts and experience through his long and undoubtedly rich life. I couldn't tell if he was really native born American or immigrated from somewhere a long time ago, but he wasn't a tourist. He didn't have an umbrella, and only his hat protected his head from the rain. It wasn't a storm, just light drizzles, and he seemed to enjoy it. The little droplets that landed or formed on his face accentuated the experience and thoughts he must have accumulated under those wrinkles.

He sat down without really noticing me. That's New York for you. He didn't do much. I wondered why he chose to sit here. Because of the drizzle most benches were empty. But he picked this empty spot on a bench already occupied. He looked into the distance, where there were a lot of people, as usual, even on a rainy day, walking fast everywhere. This was Union Square, where traffic and people converge doing shopping and a lot of nothing. But he was looking in to the distance without really noticing the crowd.

She would be here soon. She with her wavy auburn hair with golden highlights, under one of her cute umbrellas, the kind that looked like a hemisphere, and transparent, with some cute designs. I would probably get up and we would go sit somewhere else. So it wasn't a problem that the elderly man was sitting here. She would be smiling. We did it. We have come so far with so much bravery and so little care about the world. I imagined her red rose lips parting a little, showing the ivory white and perfect teeth. And her voice, more enchanting anything I could see from her, would go so well to the soothing rhythm of the rain. And we would embrace, maybe even kiss in public. Both so sweet, both so missed.

"You really like her, I can see," said the old man. I looked at him and then looked away in astonishment.

The rose bush, the botanical garden. The one in Broolyn. The one where I used to go every year, at least once. The last time was last week. That was the last time I saw her. The roses were nearing their peak; there were a lot of tourists and local visitors. There was a marble bench. Amazingly, none of the tired visitors was sitting there. So we took advantage of this narrow window of opportunity and both sat there. It was a chilly, stony bench, but we giggled instantly.

Yes, at some point, I remembered now, I saw him, an old man, without a hat that day, glancing at us for a moment. Maybe he watched us some other time but we were not really paying attention. Or maybe I was just making this up. He said he saw us there, so in my head I started putting the puzzle together. Was there such a man? And what was he doing here? For a moment, I was frightened. A stalker of some twisted way. My mind raced through all the scenarios.

Throughout this brief conversation he never once looked at me, kept his gaze mostly at the distant Toys R Us. He continued, his lips barely moving, his throat giving slight hints of the breath that was generating the story he was telling me, a short story, a story about me, and I couldn't at the moment tell what was the story doing to me, to my psyche. My heart traveled to strange distances in those ten minutes listening to him, to his voice. That voice. It was a powerful voice even though we were in a relatively noisy place and he was not shouting. There was strength in the softness of his voice. He bore no accent, and the subtle emotion that accompanied his words reverberated like the occasional gusts of winds that moved the roses that day last week. It was a sunny day, it was a slightly windy day, but it was a beautiful, at least in my eyes. For him, it was a different day, watching us, from a distance, without needing to hide or make himself look awkward.

His name was Antonio Caglieri, but he bore no accent that would have matched his very Italian name. That was the only piece of information I gather about his overall life. Then onward to the story.

(To be continued)

The Dirty Dishes

Her mind goes briefly to the sink, where her dirty dishes lay unattended for the past two days. She wouldn't have cared but her roommate needs some of the things and he doesn't always succeed to avoid giving her a hard time. Her mind is already looking at the dishes. It wouldn't take her very long to wash them. But then her body is doing something else. Her hand is already holding her cell phone, her fingers already typing the number that she manages to get her distracted mind to recall the owner of. The spelling of this person's name. Someone important, more important, suddenly than the dishes, the pots, the chopsticks, the knife. How old is the crud on that knife? But her mind stops there and takes a detour, a long detour, to the person she feels she must call now. There isn't a moment when she isn't talking on the phone, talking to a guest, talking on the computer, or writing emails, except when she is working. To actually find the time for her surroundings, whether it's other people or the dishes seems quite difficult.

The phone at the other end starts to ring, and in that moment hearing the humming of the first ring, her mind falls momentarily back on the dishes track. She gets up from her seat. When did she sit back down again. When she first thought about the dishes, she was standing, holding the phone, looking at the screen as her finger scrolls through the list of names to find the one she's looking for. She was typing in the approximate spelling of the person's name, but she was having trouble because her mind back then was momentarily looking at the dishes in the kitchen. She was standing. But now, somehow, she finds herself sitting in front of the computer.

She should at least take a look at the sink, to see how things are. She gets up, and while doing so the person on the other end picks up. "Hi, this is Mary calling. Is Jane there?" She half expects the answer from the other side and so her mind is already half-made up on a response. The other end is quiet for a while until Jane's voice is heard. Now she is walking through the dining room and by the time she starts her friendly, warm greeting with Jane, she was already in the kitchen. She opens the fridge door as she tells Jane the business of canceling the meeting they were supposed to be going to soon, but because of the snow....

Now she has in her other hand a bag of potato chips. But wasn't she opening the door to the fridge? She isn't sure. She is now too focused on the conversation. There is a lot of planning now that the original plan has been changed by what was so foreseeable by everyone who had a TV or internet access. She uses her right ear and right shoulder to squeeze the phone while she can free up her hands to rip open the bag of chips.

"I will call Tom now and see what he thinks about our plan. Oh, and how are the kittens?" She needs to chitchat, to not make it sound 100% business. The kittens seem fine, newly adopted and happy in a new home away from a fate they would never have the misfortune to know because Jane is such a wonderful person. That's what she is thinking before she realized she was dialing Tom's number while taking out a salsa dip. The fridge, her level at least, is not so full and half the stuff is molding or gone bad. "That smell...." It's her long expired milk. But she doesn't notice. The smell is just another bad smell and her natural reaction is to close the fridge door.

Again, squeezing the phone between her right ear and right shoulder, she greets Tom while trying to wring open the lid. "It's Mary calling. Hey Tom. Sorry to call you so late...." Is it really late? She just says that all the time because most of the time she does call people late, completely oblivious of the hour of making such calls. It is a running joke behind her back that she likes to apologize so she could transgress common decency rules.

Why doesn't the lid just come off?

She's increasingly getting distracted by the frustration over the unopenable jar of salsa for her chips. Tom isn't very happy; not only is she calling late (it is actually very late for a father of a one-year old boy), but also because the change in the plan would almost certainly mean that he can't make the meeting, which he wanted to make some points in. She tries to be understanding but also tries to make him understand, but as she tries harder and becomes more frustrated with the jar, she eventually can't pay attention anymore. She usually talks a lot, never ending, until the other person, either through her success of making him understand or simply gets tired of listening to her droning, would comply with whatever she wants them to comply or even feel. But now she isn't talking much.

Why doesn't this darn jar just budge!

"Hold on a moment Tom, just hold on please! Thank you," she says then puts the phone down. she walks to get a dry towel, and on her way back, she notices the sinkfull of her dishes, pans, a knife, and a lot of bowls. She picks up the phone again, and as soon as she says "hello" Tom tells her that he can't talk more but that he doesn't like the idea. And before she could try to convince him to listen on, he apologized and insisted that he got back to his son who started crying.

Silence. It was her and the jar whose lid seemed married to the jar of food that is needed for her to eat the chips. In her mind, she wants to break the jar open, with a hammer if she must. In her mind, there's also the dishes, the bowls, the knives, and everything else not normally in her mind, everything else neglected.

She puts down the jar next to the bag of chips, and walks towards the dishes that are bracing themselves for a long sought after shower of cleanliness. But half way through, her mind finds a name and her fingers already started going through the address list.