Thursday, February 16, 2012

AT NIGHT, THE CHILDREN


At night, the children wait for the firestars. They sit on their porches or on their porch steps, each with an aluminum bucket full of water by his or her side, spending hours looking up at the sky. Many come to memorize the names and shapes of all the constellations and can tell planets from stars. And of course, they have wished upon many a falling star, mostly for sleep. The firestars are falling stars, in their own way, of course. But they are different, primarily because they are orange. And it is the dim speckles of orange that the children look out for, their eyes open through 3am exhaustion.

The firestars appear first as small and flickering flakes, so high up and moving so slowly that they look like flaming 707 airplanes. As they come down—they do not drift down like leaves, they dart down, like bombs—and get closer, their shapes become more distinguishable: one can see what comprises the heart of the firestar, the black and burning star, surrounded by the fire it produces, the fire that surrounds the star and also gives the firestar its orange-red wake. And as it gets even closer to the ground—and this is a child’s main way of telling if the firestar is going to land anywhere near the child’s house—the crackling sound of fire, like that of wrinkling paper, accompanies the firestar, the firestar which is about the size of a human head.

And then, with a soft tap, a little paf, the comet lands on the ground, creating a ring of fire small enough for a bucket of water to soak out.

If the firestar lands on the front yard or on the backyard or on the roof, it is the child’s job to assure that the fire be put out before it spreads out and consumes the house. So the child picks up the bucket and pours the water over the burning fire, thus putting out last breaths of the firestar, drowning its last few flames, leaving behind what was once the head of the blistering comet: a wrinkled-up, ashen, and paper-textured star, its five triangular legs curled up, like the head and arms and legs of a baby in the fetal position.

The child then puts the bucket on its side on the ground and, using a broom, sweeps the star into the bucket. He walks back to the house and then puts the star in the porch floorboards. The more firestars fall, the more they get heaped up on the porch, the child piling them up as the night goes on and eventually makes way for morning.

When the first rays of sunshine appear and the dark blue begins to brighten—that is when the weary child can go back to sleep and not see the bucket or the night until the next night.

And this is how nights are for the children of Firestar Bay.

For the parents, the day begins when the sun has come up. They wake up with wide smiles and slip on their morning sandals. If their room is in the second story of the house, then they rush down the stairs, almost stumbling over each other—such is their ecstasy as they slam the porch door open and see—oh yes! The heap of firestars! Look how beautiful they look when they are dead, they say to each other, there, dried-up and piled on the porch.

Then, beaming with pride, they wake up their children, who had gone to sleep a few hours before.

“You are so good at star-gazing!” they say.

“I wish I could still be a child, putting out the fires! I miss the smell of the night, the smell of the smoke, the contemplation that the solitude allowed!” a dad says.

“If I could only stay up late without worry of performing badly in my job the next day, I would surely stay up with you and gaze at the sky!” a mother says.

“Oh, isn’t it wonderful to watch a rain of firestars?” they both ask.

“Isn’t it wonderful to watch them when they are alive? It is so sad for us, to only see them when they are dead. But it is what we can have! And we sure are proud of it, and proud of you, dear child, for keeping us safe!”

The child, if the child awakens, mumbles along, a yes or a no or something indecipherable under a sleepy, croaking voice. The parents just nod and nod and nod and go back outside to look at the heap of dried-up firestars on their front porch with doting eyes, holding each other’s hands and remembering their beautiful childhood and their shared past before quickly blowing at the dried-up stars with their mouths and seeing them disintegrate into the white morning air, becoming ashes so disperse that they are nothing, nothing at all, the porch now looking as clean as it ever did.

And then they go to work in their cars, which vroom away trailing smoke.

Two hours later, the child wakes up with eyes surrounded by black rings, to go to school.

Firestar season lasts August to May. During the summer vacation, no firestars fall, and the children are free to play at night and to run around with their friends. But what most children do, at least for the first few weeks of summer, is sleep, because summer is the only time that they can dream.

Friday, February 10, 2012

THE MOST DIFFICULT QUESTION



The husband scrambles into his house and slams the door behind him, pressing his back up against the wooden door, pressing his fingers up against that hardwood, pressing. He grunts.
            And then he exhales. Sweat drips down his face and shirt. His tie is askew and his heart beats with the pace of a fever nightmare. He puts his hand over his chest and closes his eyes. It is morning, and no morning has ever begun like this. Not for him and, he guesses, not for anybody. He lets himself breathe again, a chilly heat simmering his body. He turns his head, puts his ear to the door. He could peek through the window beside the door, but that would entail looking outside.
            He hears no sound, and still nothing pushes against the door. He exhales again, and this time he lets himself feel some relief.
            His fingers let go of the hardwood. His back, too.
His mind turns to his wife and son. And faintly, he hears the sound of their simple breakfast chatter from the kitchen. He pictures them in the kitchen, now surely aglow with white sunlight, and the fear slithers away like a snake that vows to return.
            He paces. He tries to walk, of course. He tries to be as composed as he can be as he approaches the kitchen, but he only achieves this awkward, shaky pace. He cannot stop his fingers from trembling. And when he appears at the kitchen doorway, his skin looks yellow with fear.
His wife and son are sitting down at the white table. They have red bowls of cereal. A flake hangs off his son’s lower lip. The son’s tongue slides out of his mouth and disappears the flake from view.
When they look up and look at the man of the family—the husband knows that they will read it in his face—everything will change.    
His wife asks him with a look, a questioning frown in her eyes. He answers with desperate exhalations and a brief shaking of the head, all that he can muster at the moment. That should be enough for her, for now.
But the boy asks with words.
And the question of his son, that is, the question of a child who wants to know what is going on outside, the husband realized then, is the most difficult to answer.

Monday, February 6, 2012

THE DYING GAME

The little bowl fell and broke into three thousand pebbles of glass, clear pebbles so small you could call them sand, and the water that the former bowl used to contain now spread all over the floor like the eight tentacles of an octopus.

The fish lay alone on the floor, its waterless gills gasping for their watery oxygen. I could hear it. And I knew then that the sound of a fish gasping for breath is very similar to the sound of a helpless man gasping for breath. Like a creaking door, that inward scream of the man trying to swallow oxygen from nothing. And every time the fish opened up its gills, finding no water, I heard it: those creaks of desperation. Its glassy eyes stared at nothing, but I could feel them pleading to me. That is, it could form no facial expression to tell me it was dying, but it was telling me anyway.

I scrambled to the floor and tried to reassamble the pieces of glass-sand. I formed a perfect mound of glass pebbles that looked like a translucent Everest. The water was flat on the floor and I could not tell it to stand up and go to the nearest bowl. My hands scrambled. I went for the fish and cupped it in my hands. I will save you, because while you drown I now feel myself drowning.

I ran to the kitchen sink and then I flipped the fish over to my left hand, wrapped that hand’s fingers around it (you will not fall from my hand, fish), and then used my right hand to turn the C handle on the kitchen sink: WHEEAK WHEEAK, it creaked, the sound of metal turning on metal. No water tunneled through the tube’s hollow brass-blackness. So I turned the H handle (it’s better to be hot than to be dead, fish, don’t worry, you won’t die), to no results.

My right hand went back to my left hand and I went back to cupping the fish and I ran or scrambled or rather my legs were like the awkward legs of a scissor jumping across the house; this is what saving a life does to me. I ran with my scissor-legs (thank god I don’t have scissor hands, fish, haha) to the bathroom and tried the H and C handles on the shaving-hair-ridded sink, the H and C handles on the shower, and then I, yes, I opened the toilet and it was as dry as my throat and the fish’s throat.

So of course I ran back to the kitchen and took my right hand out of my left hand to get a cup from the counter and put the cup’s lip under my eye and started to squint and to wince and to think of dead babies or dead fish in order to get the tears out, but my tear ducts inside my eyes were as hollow as the brass tubes of all the sinks in my house.

Two doors swing open and a splash of sunlight: I am outside, running, and where is the damn river? All cities have rivers but I only see houses, and all these houses are empty, and the only blue thing around here is the sky and there aren't even any white clouds, so I run, and then the sound of a blocked lung, an inwards burp, the open mouth of the fish being the open arms of a mother, the lack of water being the lack of a son, the lack of a daughter, the lack of a father, all at the same time, because H2O is like that: it is everything you need to be alive, fish.

I run to many houses, knock on many doors, but either they don’t answer or they don’t care about the fish. Everything is dry of water. 

Now the night is about to fall, and the fish is still dying in my hands. I sit down on the curb and look down at it, see its body bobbing up and down, still half-breathing. This is no way to live, fish, I say. 


*

“So I cupped it in my hands, this little fish that, trying to find water in the wind, and in a state of permanent asphyxiation, would not die,” he said. “And I ran. I could never find the water, nor did the fish ever die. I wondered then: if the fish is to live in this semi-death outside the water, will water only kill the fish? If so, should I throw it in the water? Can you see my position? I couldn’t just let go of the fish and throw it on the floor, because then the fish would never die. But I couldn’t take it to the water either, because then it would certainly die.”

And then I said, “Wouldn’t it be worse to be not the one holding the fish but the fish itself, the fish helpless and at the mercy of a giant being who runs, even though running doesn’t help?”