Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
At the Elephant Corners
Monday, April 13th, 2009
It took Sylvie all morning, steering her motorbike through crowded market streets and up stairway alleys, before she found the corner and the four bas-relief elephants, right where the fortune teller said they’d be, sculpted into the stone of each building at the intersection. The second-floor balconies perched like howdahs on the backs of the elephants, and the doors were half-hidden in the legs that were the buildings’ front corners.
Sylvie tugged the bell-pull by the knee of the blue elephant’s door-leg, heard a faint chime and the sound of feet down stairs. The door opened; a woman bent from the second step. She wore a long dress, black and covered with tiny glinting beads, her hair wrapped in a white towel, as if just washed. She curled her hand in a gesture that seemed to mean Sylvie should follow, and led the way up.
The fortune woman had said Sylvie would die, soon and horribly, if she didn’t stay in the elephant long enough to hear three things.
They came up into bright sunlight on the howdah-porch. Beyond it, the room went back into shadows. Sylvie saw couches and cushions on which more women in dark dresses sat or lounged. Incense so heavy she nearly sneezed. From below, the sputter-pop of her motorbike, someone stealing it, or trying to, and almost ran back down the stairs.
A life-size silver gorilla sculpture, on top of which someone had left a dusty bowler hat.
“For any who visit,” said the woman. “You can go no farther bare-headed.”
Sylvie put it on. The thief had the bike motor rumbling close to the right note. Sylive’s palms sweated; ever since the last accident, she knew every time she started the bike, every time made a delivery, it might lead to a final accident. That’s why she’d found the fortune teller.
The whine of her bike increasingly distant as Syvie walked into the room, stepping around cushions. This must have been the fortune teller’s plan. Send her here so her bike would be stolen, and she couldn’t die in a crash.
“Not many find us,” said the woman. That was two.
Sylvie had escaped death, but, without a bike, she doubted there was anything the fortune woman could to do to avoid Debtors’ Island.
“What is this place?” said Sylvie.
“It is the fortune tellers’ school.” The woman spread her arms. Smiled. Women on the nearer couches looked up. “And you are our newest student.”
The Lost Seed
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Spring never really showed up when the calendars said it did. By April first, we rarely saw anything but solid-cloud skies and lumps of icy snow all over our frozen mud yards. But the pomegranate made us feel things weren’t completely hopeless.
The Mentonville pomegranate wasn’t as famous as that groundhog down in Pennsylvania. We’d stand in the sleet on the city hall steps, while the civil witch muttered the spell and the mayor tossed the fruit over our heads.
The pomegranate exploded at the top of its arc, and the seeds would drift, random as fireflies, red as taillights, and scatter.
Our parents would hurry us home to start looking for the seed we knew was somewhere. When we did, sleet would turn to warm rain, mud would thaw, and spring would arrive.
Some families, it took less than a week; for others, nearly a month. Spring came, eventually, to everyone.
Except, one year, for the Ziglars, who didn’t seem to be trying at all. The rest of us mowed our lawns for the first time while they were getting their snow shovels back out. The rest of us were swimming down at the oxbow, while the Ziglar kids skated on the flooded patch beyond their backyard.
We all thought they were crazy, but, in the hottest days of August, we paid a quarter to shiver fifteen minutes on the winter side of the fence.
The adults didn’t admit the Ziglars were onto something until the leaves started turning, and the Ziglars’ lawn finally began to green. It was a long winter for the rest of us, but a balmy summer for them. So it was with a certain satisfaction that we all saw the unfound seed sprout to a whole tree in the waning days of their out-of-sync summer. A whole tree laden with fruit: there was no way the Ziglars were dodging the natural order of things this year.
We were right: when the pomegranate burst downtown, every one on the Ziglar’s tree exploded. There was no way they couldn’t find a seed. It was spring by sunset, and they didn’t see another cloud for months, but roasted in the fiercest drought in memory.
Still, they did OK, their fields yielding more than anyone else’s, watered as they were by meltwater from the properties on all sides, where the rest of us were trying the winter thing.