23 March 2005
Pirates
**note** this is my first stream of consciousness writing that I did in class today... never written in this style before... please comment!!**
She walks out of class. First, stopping to inform a student. And another one. Then, a pensive silence. I wonder what my brain can produce. A giggle, “this is ridiculous.” I wrote my first story when I was around 12. It was about Pepper, and my friend’s cat, Cookies. Pepper was a happy-go-lucky pirate, his tongue lolling and a grin always stretching to his floppy ears. Slobber flying along with his high spirits. Cookies. Cookies the sly sidekick with a French accent and advisor to an otherwise reckless pirate at sea. My mother complained that I never let her read it. I heard the dart of jealousy in her voice, because I let the little children of her friend read it. And her friend read it and said her children loved it. It’s gone now, I tell her. It’s a shame, says my mother – I’ve never read anything you’ve written. I’ve also never sung her a song, even though I used to sing in nightclubs. The trouble started when I was thirteen. That year I wrote a twenty page story about cockroaches and insanity. My father asked if I was on drugs. I wasn’t. My mother lay crying on the narrow bathroom floor of our pink seashell house on a hill in Almaty. What happened? Cold tiles answer. I drunk some vodka, she says. She never drinks. She weeps. I’ve never seen her weep before. My father sits, cross with the living room, dismissing me with folded arms. Later, I am to go away from home. I’m fourteen. I’m elated. My parents will be on the other side of the world. In Vietnam. My mother slapped me once. Then she ripped out the phone-line when I locked myself in my room. Then I was alone in Finland, in a two bedroom apartment in Westend. Pepper wasn’t happy with me. He shed hair all over the apartment. He was lonely when I went to school all day and howled until the neighbors complained. So I went to Hanoi to let Pepper be closer to my parents. He’d never been alone all his life. He always had a big garden to run in. My parents in Haiphong. Perhaps I missed them, too. But then I am stalked. I walk into my apartment, alone and everyday the phone rings at just that moment. I hate the screeching monkeys in the big cage just outside my kitchen window. They shriek and they piss and they smell bad and nobody cleans the cage very often. At night I am lonely so I go and sit with the guards of the compound. They teach me to smoke Vietnamese tobacco from a dragon-etched water-bong. A face of a smiling man on the clear packet of tobacco. And a phone number. When I walk into my apartment every day, a smirking voice with a thick accent. I know where you live. I know where you go to school. I will pick you up tomorrow. On the weekend my mother and Pepper come down from Haiphong. Mother cooks in the kitchen. There is a balcony from my room where I hide and smoke. I drop the cigarette but down onto excess roof-sheets that are red and waiting purpose in a pile two stories below me. My mother walks in thirty seconds after I walk in from the balcony. It smells like cigarettes in here she says. It must have gotten stuck in the aircon, I say. So bad – why did they smoke inside before? She frowns. I take care not to breathe in her direction. My dad picks me up from school one day. I see his face and I know that sometimes things shatter to pieces even when it wasn’t me that dropped them. We’d been gone for just one day on the weekend and left Pepper in the backyard in Haiphong. The scenery of the bay with green jutting rocks like rotten teeth from blue gums but beautiful and majestic with sea wind. I stood on the roof of the boat. When we got back, Pepper is sick. By the fourth day he is so so thin. He can’t move, even wagging his tail is an effort, but he drags himself across the floor and tries to fetch the tennis ball I gently roll two meters on the ground, but can not even stimulate his haunches to heave. He’s exhausted from the strain and I embrace him and he is too weak to whimper. My dad is standing outside my school on a Tuesday. Why isn’t he two hours away at work? The neighbors in Haiphong say a ghost called his spirit away so that the bones could be returned home because when we dug his grave we found a skeleton from the war. The soul was impatient, they say. The vet said rat poison. My dad joined me crying as we buried Pepper. I wept when I felt the stiffness of his ears. My mother was away in Thailand. I know you smoke he said, and offered me a cigarette. It’s been our secret ever since. I cried and cried and finally told my parents I need to get away from here, I told them I was stalked, I told them about the motorcyclist that sometimes drove past and knocked me over and how the guards just watched. They let me go. I’m not safe here I’m scared.
fon @ 9:54 pm link to post * *