Archive for the ‘Alex Dally MacFarlane’ Category
New Year’s Wishes
Friday, January 4th, 2008
Wishes fluttered around us with the snow. I held out my hands, cup-curved, and tried to catch one. Throughout the square, men, women and children did the same–hoping they would catch their own, which was the best luck of all, or that theirs would fall into the hands of someone who would understand, someone who would say Yes and grant it.
I had little to wish for this year. My son grew strong, my husband’s back had recovered and when the ground thawed he would return to our spice fields. War had not come to our province in five years. Perhaps I should have wished for my sister to fall pregnant again with a baby that would not die only days out of the womb; but no, that was her wish to make.
War would come and go regardless of wishes. We all knew that.
Looking down at my snow-flecked and spice-stained hands–red and orange and yellow between the grooves in my palms, and the colours would not fade no matter how hard I scrubbed–I saw a wish. Black letters in the curves and dots of our script covered the paper-scrap.
A final kiss, before I depart for Aratavi.
My hand shook, a little.
I imagined the person who might have stood in line earlier in the day, waiting to write his or her wish so that it could be scattered by our town’s priest. Knowing that soon the journey to Aratavi must be begun–a journey to search for the remains of a loved one. People went to Aratavi during peace-time for no other reason. And in the marshes and pools, rife with the stream-women and algae-men who had killed so many of us, many found only their own grave.
Yes, I thought.
I rubbed paprika on my lips.
One by one, I kissed every person in the square. I left red marks in my wake. That way, I knew who I had yet to step up to, smiling kindly before I pressed my lips against their cheek, their brow.
An hour after the priest scattered our wishes, the bell tolled again, signifying that the previous year had transitioned into the current. I had kissed every man, woman and child.
I would never know whose wish landed in my hands. There was the man who touched my hair, briefly, before I moved on; the woman who whispered Thank you when I kissed the fist-shaped bruise on her chin; the man who wept silently through the hour. Perhaps it was one of them, but perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. I granted the wish.
And my own wish, also: Happiness, in whatever dose possible.
Bear
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
In the amusement park, the rollercoaster roared like a bear. Each twist, each pretzel-like loop, each sudden plummet — on all of these, the wheels went over the track and out came that wild-creature sound. That roar.
I stood beside the empty seats and my dress was the same bright red as the straps’ buckles.
My torch flickered once, almost went out. Stupid brother, I thought. He’d said they were new batteries when he gave them to me, clenched in his fist like the coins I gave him to make sure he wouldn’t tell our parents.
The metal shapes of the rollercoaster jutted out of the dark, their lines straight, narrow. They looked like bars.
So distinctive, that roar, that children and adults from miles away came to listen to it. Some sat in the seats of the rollercoaster, feeling the roar through their backs and chests and legs. Others stood below and felt it in their ears. They said that it sounded like fresh snow and pine needles, a mate and her cubs, pink fish, blackberries and discarded cans.
They said these things, but they did not think.
After that roar lapped against my ears and my skin, tongue-rough, I couldn’t stop thinking about the bear. Couldn’t they hear how much it wanted to go home? On every corkscrew it cried for its mate, on the final plummet it pined for scales and a wriggling tail beneath its paw.
“We are lucky,” people said, “that Old Man Rickernell built us such a profitable thing.”
In my great-grandfather’s house, buckles covered the walls like sculpted patterns. Some were silver, some gold, some wooden. Some were plain, others carved with complex designs that I couldn’t follow.
I remember touching a half-made one in his workshop, and it felt like an insect bite.
“There’s power in a good buckle,” he once said.
And so I cut them all off, one by one, from the straps on the rollercoaster. They clanged on the floor, chain onto metal, until I reached the last one and the bear burst out of the metal and plastic, breaking its cage into a thousand pieces. Part of a chair hit my arm and I fell, dropping the torch, and tried not to cry into the black night. The bear ignored me.
I heard his roar, triumphant into the night as he ran through the turnstiles and down the steps, and it sounded like the stars and the moon, and trees on the horizon.