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FLOWERS ON HER HEAD
© 1995 NIN

Margot's head is my misery.

On it, the hat.

The misery.

I don't think I could describe what it's like, except that it looks like.....misery. A saucer made of wool, with heaps of wool flowers of all colors. The hat has been causing more road accidents than the worst kind of drivers. A hat is a hat; Margot is my girl. But slowly since she was taken to wear that darn thing the two have been a conspiracy -- Margot and her hat is they, I and my misery is we.

All the symptoms were there: she cared more about the hat than she did about me. In the morning when she woke up, the wool flowers yawned and the floreated thoughts inside the head strectched, they were one. The floresence of her life drove me nuts. She had taken art courses and did try to paint. She read poetry and started to talk crazy. A florid new world. Without me.

The flowers took all the sun from me. I was stunted. They robbed my water. I withered.

I knew then, the hat planned it all from the beginning. It had plotted my demise. There it was, on her head, while she didn't even remember that I was still alive. I had no place on and inside her head. The hat reigned.

My misery got more and more oceanic until that day.....

The sea, unreasonably grey, called the waves to my feet and I knew it was the time.

I took the hat and the sea swallowed it.

It and Margot.

She happened to be wearing it.

She screamed the scream I've never heard before.

I listened, but she stopped just in a short while. Then silence and peace.

A few minutes later, as I walked along the shore, the sea vomitted -- the wool flowers, of all colors, floated there when the sun went lazily down and the horizon was the only thing that got the light.

 

 

ICED
© 1989 NIN

A baby bird, learning to fly and is scared of the chance to fall. That was Dmitri's thought as he stood there, white cloak over his shoulders, white smoke-like carbondioxyde snaked in the air from his breath. So they said Petsamo has never known ice. Far away, maybe somewhere inside his own mind, dead ships laid still, white light on the water formed bizarre visual fragments. He couldn't make up his mind whether thinking was decent while the cold wind seemed to cut him in half.

And the German soldier with his odd voice wanted him to sit there listening to the tale old as time. Not only the accent maddened him, but also the very mention of death kicked his Russian ears unpleasantly. But he couldn't say no. A weakness he only admitted rarely -- whenever Tasha danced her graceful dance within the room in his mind, he couldn't say no to anyone asking him a favor.

So he listened. He really did, because he wanted to forget.

"I've been there," he heard himself when the old German stopped talking to lit his pipe. "I've been there...."

What an absurd picture.

The ochre Afghanistan was so weirdly out of place there while the night was still and winter enveloped the continent. Hot sun that never slept and brown dust everywhere -- funny that he couldn't remember how did it taste at the back of his mouth -- he used to curse this part of the world while he was there.

Wasted years.....And the old man now talked of his son Dietmar who was another ghost where seagulls should roam. Died in a brawl, drunk and full of an ego he couldn't contain, a memory so wild to the father's mind that he actually clenched his bony fists as if he tried to tame and harness it so it could be his.

To Dmitri the favorite son of the old German was an obvious jerk. But he didn't say this. Not that he was considerate -- he didn't care about neither of them. He only kept himself quiet because he thought himself was another kind of fool -- a bigger one, maybe -- at least the stupid German kid never killed anybody.

Suddenly the old man started to talk of his old pals and how they went skiing in the Alps. Dmitri still listened, he knew the old mind would fold again to the one and only thing he talked of most often -- and he did. "Every time my feet got off the ice," he said, "I thought like this: 'I'll fall and die! I'll fall and die!'"

"Maybe you should really die," said Dmitri.

The German laughed. The coarseness of his voice sliced the air and turned the ice on Dmitri's mind to shreds of cheap melancholy. He heard himself laughing, too.

"The war isn't over yet," said the old man, packing up the remnants of his laughter from the cold air and inhaled them back.

"No, it's not over yet," said Dmitri.

"Never will be," the old man said.

Dmitri wanted to say something but he forgot what that was. Tasha danced still, the silence was the music that made her fly. So many years and so little time.

"Orgies," said the old German.

"What?" Dmitri started.

"Death...." the old man coughed violently for a minute or so. He didn't finish the sentence nor repeat what he said before that.

The cold came back. Dmitri could see his own mind hardened little by little, iced.

 

 

JADED
© 1993 NIN

Dusk was russet. You couldn't tell where the sky started and horizon ended. Then everything turned sorrel before you blinked. It reminded me of Creation and how someone like God must have hungered for an audience.

The night looked reluctant. It threw itself above me like a used blanket.

The caffeine in me fought for survival. I had been somnambulist. I still felt like I had never slept.

Life turned a somersault and I was the only hands clapping down here; its echo sailed far enough before it bumped into the night and got muffled beneath the fat old sky.

I met two zombies there.

The old woman eyed me as if I were Malady; her hands, that looked like parts of the parchments they unearthed near the Dead Sea, were raised as shields, separating me and the soul that was quickly shut the way clams do.

"What do you want?" she growled.

"Nothing," I said.

She hissed and that was her way to throw in a disbelief.

I was too near to the cage she spent her minutes in. It was a small concrete cubicle with rusty iron bars, planted in a stone wall. I have heard about when and why; what I wondered about was how. She was a nun until they found her pregnant. After the birth of no one knew what she went out from normalcy into nut. They kept saying she was a vacant shell of a human from that day on. They said she was a dried fish in an unopened cosmological dusty can. They passed this place, glanced at the cage, holding sanity like a mace. "Poor hag," they muttered; "We're free out here and she's got to get locked-up."

I wasn't aware that I had thought out loud. She heard me.

"Poor stupid girl," she said.

"What?" I turned to her, startled.

"Not good out there," she said. "Here I'm feared better." She laughed; it was a carbondioxide laugh, the noise was lye spattered across the bars, it shook them some. I walked on.

The man clenched his mind when I almost got near. I felt this resentment. He saw me as an intruder. The part of the place was sacrosanct. They said he was the sole survivor of a ship that was munched by storm one night. He got here and stayed put like a ghost on everyone's nights from then on. There were some people that said he reminded them of dead, acid grandpas. He was a clingstone to passersby; you see him once, he stays in your mind. Sometimes people saw him sitting there, staring at the night, tears came running down his cheeks like rain on rocky slopes and creeks. He had never said anything and they thought he was mute and deaf; some imagined that he bit off his tongue when the ship sunk sucking all his possessions as if those were tributes to Triton.

I didn't turn around but neither did I need to. His eyes went through me like a pair of blades, casting shadows ahead.

I stopped and sat on the grass where the river got snaky. I was there for autumn dreaming. Nothing was there but darkness and a piece of the moon, hatred and anger and the bottomless misery of the two beings I had just seen.

I saw my fingers curling on the discolored grass, pale and skinny. It was so silent. I could hear my own cells moving within, and the blood in my veins hurled itself here and there in restless waves. My eyes were hurt, behind them millions of invisible darts being thrown. The joints could be rented for horror movies. They sounded like ancient doors, opened for the first time in centuries. I could feel my stomach cramped, teeth rotting and toes like about to fall off. Nothing had ever been right in me. But never this acutely. And in the midst of all the ultimate pain was a papercut in my heart. I lived to rot.

I might not be among the living dead there at the remote park. But downtown was a mortuary.

Those who feared were roaming every spot freely. The feared was behind concrete and steel and on a stone bench which was never left.

 

MORE OR LESS GOD
© 1991 NIN

"I fall in love with God," my little sister wrote in her last letter.

Holding it in my hands and devouring the words once more, I shuddered.

She had a beautiful nose, a beautiful set of eyes, beautiful lips and beautiful hair on her head -- but everybody said she was mad.

Mom and dad sent her to the doctors and they locked her up.

Mom had her first thought that sister was not alright when she said "Don't you feel silly singing at church, mom? Why do you think God likes such noises like songs, prayers, sermons?" I remember that I laughed. Nobody could say that our church's choir was anything but a patchwork done in the moonless night by a colorblind old woman. Even the priest was visibly feeling the pain whenever they started to sing. But nobody ever criticized them. They sang for God, and every voice is best in God's ears.

"If I don't like it, God doesn't either," sister said.

So they took her to her room and gave her some tranquilizer.

But when she was awaken by her own dreams, she would write to me. I felt flattered but scared. I had begun to see how mad I might be, as well.

"I fall in love with me," she wrote. "That means I fall for God. We all are God. More or less."

And I wrote back that she should not think such a thought, she should get back to her former self, she should not utter blasphemy, she should rest and cure herself, and I even urged her to think of boys.

I haven't sent my reply yet. Somehow it didn't sound right. I caught myself red-handed. I thought I was thinking that I was more of a god and she was less.

 

SORE
© 1994 NIN

Only bigger fools trust him. Others are made of protein and a dash of faith; every atom in him is a lie.

Eyeing the thick back of his head, all decent thoughts in mine vanished like the Atlantis -- they have never been, to begin with. The automathon inside shrieked for plans to commit horrific crimes.

I

hate

him.

And when I hate I'm paralyzed. The outward look is dumb submission. He, of course, took it as concession.

"It will never happen again," he said, turning around. "I love you."

Without my consent a smile started to curve my lips but it censored itself quickly and stopped right there. He scanned and found me empty. Mistook it as willingness to listen.

It has always been hilarious, his "I love you"'s. That and tears and hugs and kisses are his only weapons. I have never forgiven him -- I did what I have done because I like the taste of power those give me. What a mushy head, what a pathetic vermin. He has never known what I really felt for him.

"Okay," I said after his last dot in the story I didn't listen to. "I love you."

His mouth cracked. The fat lips curled up in what was supposed to be a smile. The long barren face, where no hair could ever grow on, was beaming like a TV screen in the dark, always so as if you sit too close, inviting vertigo. His small myopic eyes twinkled like cheap lights on a plastic Christmas tree. This clown loved me.

The more life bares itself, the more I got turned off.

He lied about that night; he lied about the nights before and other nights after. Not only he lied, he also thought I bought them and when he knew I didn't he bawled and asked to be forgiven. What did the woman see in him, by the way? He lied to her like to any other. He lied to himself even more often.

A chronic liar, it stalked him everywhere anytime like TB. A little something, and it got activated, drilling through his brain and composing tall tales, so tall they bumped to the door frames and lost their heads there.

When I got up at three in the morning I got to turn my face away from the sight. A naked lie was lying there on my bed. Overcoming nausea, I did what I shouldn't -- I stared at him long, I looked at him hard. What a big bulk of lamentably living cells. His flesh was so free of muscular activity, sagging around him like used condoms arranged to resemble a dummy. Up and down his navel a spectacular view of a beer belly. The small appendix to this body was peeping out at the bottom, a dormant worm, worn-out. He snored and the whole bulk was buoyed.

And this was what they called my husband?

A cold shower couldn't refresh me. Only my memory. Panting and shaking and clinging to life when he came on me and I tried to pull my vomit back.

When it's over, with later day's eyes it would only be ".....and she was put into an asylum, and he raised their child alone, died at eighty-five" -- every single minute that went by slowly, reducing life little by little into nothing but the eerie, the gravity pulling down my sanity -- these would never get recorded, none would be remembered. Nobody would know his shameless lies and the boring nights and sex that for me had always been an anti-climax.

And that I stayed here only for his money.

And that the kid was Billy's.

 

 

SLUSH FACTORY
© 1996 NIN

"Wives are real salt of the earth," Ifan said. "They are also chilli and pepper and vinegar and all; in short, the things that keep me in a safe distance from the kitchen."

His tendency to get philosophical right in the middle of a crowded dangdut concert was one of the local wonders, that's why everybody who knew him developed a sudden preoccupation elsewhere when this happened. But Ifan stoically pocketed the snub and went on, "they are quite useful in some ways, like the way to the kitchen, but a man must know where to put his stuff."

The singer onstage danced like in trance nearing the chorus. The frantic sensuality that makes the dangdut itself has been helped mightily by a little booze to take minds over. Dangdut only makes sense when you're more or less drunk. Otherwise it's merely amusing. So one of the eavesdroppers - Ifan never needed loudspeakers - couldn't help but letting the hallucinogenic substance speak, "Well you ain't gonna put the stuff into chilli and vinegar and all old man," and the immediate little circle laughed as if they just heard a joke. Ifan did, too, but he also did something else, namely asking "You're gonna go home tonight to do just that," and he added, "your wife will be waiting right behind the door and you won't even know how you get a fractured skull."

The look that somehow reminds one of the state of getting bitten by ants came perching on the other man's face, the glistening sweat served like an underline in a written sentence. "If she done that I ain't gonna keep her no more," he said. After a sweaty pause (he kept dancing and smoking and talking all the while) he delivered an enlightenment, "She done throwed dishes at me when I gone back from work today. Tha bitch ain't buying my telling her the pay was half for the goddamed motorbike. Sucks!"

"See, that's very common with wives," said Ifan with a satisfaction that was almost sensual. "You're lucky you got no kids. I voted for the government's party last election because it forced wives to use contraceptives. They are not just making a man's life a misery, they also have weird notions about raising children."

"Ain't that right," said the other man, "just see my mother to say it!" The others laughed again.

"Your mom, what did she do?" asked somebody nearby.

"Well if she ain't make me like enemy with my father, I'll be damned," replied the man.

"They're always like that with sons, you know," Ifan said, "they think like they compete against the girlfriends or wives, they make war against each other, those women, and they make the fathers jealous and so boys got more beating 'cause the old man gets mad and jealous."

The somebody said something that was several miles away from being decent, and everyone laughed at that. Ifan also laughed. He didn't laugh philosophically but heartily. Then he said again, "Wives are no good in themselves, like vinegar, but you got to put it in the right place to produce something else, something good. "

"They can pickle your stuff," said the other man out loud. He got the expected appreciation and it made him dance wilder.

"Only supermen can put wives in their proper place where they can't harm anyone," said Ifan.

"I'll show her what superman is," said the other. "She ain't learning a lesson, I'll make her. You beat your wife too old man?"

"I'd love to," replied Ifan. "But in order to do that I have to get married first, I guess."

 

VOID
© 1994 NIN

She couldn't stop thinking though her hands never stopped working. Raw potteries were scattered neatly around her, she knew which was where, though to a passers-by the arrangement looked like a careless touch of her managerial hands.

As man were made of clay, she wondered what to make out of the fact that inside her was a clay baby and outside were clay housewares she had been crafting all day.

She felt like hell that day. Didn't know what to do with the little Uncle, Junior in her womb. She knew well he wouldn't give a damn. She knew too, her Aunt, his wife, would throw her out of their door the second she found out.

While she had no other place to go. Nor any place she wanted to go to. And the night got really cold, as every cell in her hurt, and her hands kept yielding pots ready for the oven tomorrow morning if the weather was good. Sleeping in the barn with all the raw pots wasn't a bright prospect that night. But she should be thankful that they gave her a place at all after she lost her own folks.

And she was expected to finish a hundred pots for the oven by morning. God it was so cold. Her body ached and she shivered violently. But she couldn't get some rest yet. There were not enough pots yet. They would get mad at her. But she wanted some sleep, just for a while, just a void dreamless sleep. If only it wasn't this cold.

She couldn't risk asking to get a place inside the house, that wasn't her place, her Aunt and Uncle had made it clear that she wasn't "family enough". It was Uncle who came night by night to her dirty barn anyway. He never took her inside his house where he got a nice clean bed for him and Auntie.

Out here, there was nothing to keep her warm. She couldn't possibly lit the haystack -- that was for business only, to burn the potteries.

But the night was too cold.

She stopped working.

Her mind though, still went on thinking why she couldn't get the void, when she set fire to the only thing they couldn't blame her for.

By morning she was burnt to ashes.