Halloween used to also be about tales, about dreams and demons. We liken them to our shadow, the unclaimed territory that is our psyche. Here it is part dream; part vision. Jesus is the ghost. And his mother, Ol’ Mary is tired. Her face is shrinking. Her eyes are like those of a blind serpent that crawls, pauses, waits for, eats the light and then: spits out the sin. When she was young a fisherman said he’d seen eyes just like hers Buried in a purple clam. He lost his married finger prying the clam. And so, he became her first sin. Every night she walks alone: walks beside her once prized cassava paths, in running sweats and dirty tennis shoes; walks right through the baby callaloo greens of her neighbor, Mr. John, in satin frocks and eight-inch high heels; walks among the mango groves of farmers mortgaged to their graves, barefooted.
Last night, after a lifetime of searching for Jesus—her only son she spotted him: At last! Perched like a haughty dandy on a big, ripe Julie mango that banged her in the head when she jumped to pluck it. Ol’ Mary heard Jesus say in a familiar voice—
[Cigarette in left hand; dreadlocks impeccably coifed behind two pointy ears]:
Woman: Stand back.
Bearing no worthy name to intercede on her behalf, Ol’ Mary decided to lie down upon the warm earth, the temerity of Jesus’ Great Refusal drowning out the maddening voices—
Even the ones of her children informing her, in unison,
On Mother’s Day:
We have changed our names: Woman, call no more!
We have changed our names: Woman, call no more!
And now, looking up at the sky, flat on her back, Ol’ Mary praised the Lord and thanked Him for her life even though— In spite of her dumb, incredulous stare—he told her he had changed his name.
Taken in by grief, Mary declared he had died in her. Jesus claimed he was aborted.
Mary cries out: Five Months I carried you in that awkward space. Some metaphysical wonderland below my navel but close to my narrow backside. For Five months I watched you grow, felt your insomniac tug at 4a.m.while your sweet daddy snored
And it is true Oh Holy Ghost, it was just you and I; me, a mad talking, talking mad woman and my unborn mate plotting together you and I, at 4.a.m. the fate that somehow I knew you’d grow to fit like a glove the way your daddy fit inside me like an old run-down lock stuck on a brand new key.
Good God the things I know you knew:
The songs; words; unspoken thoughts; fears and the dreams me and my kin hurled like cursed blessings in the sacred dimensions of that space. And in those moments you did not move, but lay like a floating golf ball that would not even budge for Mother’s calls.
Oh, little Atlas how you bore it all: the anger over the bad timing; still, the comforting reassurances from Mother’s side; their hokey talk of never having a boy to spoil and watch grow—a pied piper waiting to be stolen from my arms.
What was it little one—I mean, the cause? Was it your mother’s glow hovering like a relentless sun that seared and singed, and singed the membrane soft arteries of your little rat’s heart? Perhaps you came to say: “Mama Dear, your time has come.” And rather than wait for death to randomly pick at me like an aged flea you will choose the glorious day and turn that cherry-red Wonderland into a house of decay—our private Wasteland where you and I can play.
Four days now you’ve been lost to me in this tomb. [Old Mary is in a reverie, you see.] She says: spitefully, you are not a harvest, but a rotten grape that grew into an orange and now, a smoldering yellow pus of decaying potato.
I believe they know that space has now become a tomb, little one. They smell your rot on my breath, see sags and rocky lumps in my fomenting belly. I feel you dissolving; feel your fever rising to my throat. You poison my blood. You shorten my time.
Good God, the things you know you know, Son of God. I think. And the illusions you bleed all over with your tiny rat’s heart. You heard the lies they told about the joy and wonder of: Forthcoming Life. Your flesh eats mine now. You hasten a demise you would have started the moment your first serenaded us all, and then, a second cry to declare: “This is real.” And: “I am here.”
The doctors and the white-washed nurses would have smiled and I can see daddy, you know the way he smiles that smile? I can see it now. Big enough to swallow you whole. And all along you’ve sensed your mother’s fear, and so, you decided to erase her despair.
Now, I can taste death because life inside me which had grown and grown is now gone, and, is no more. It’s not so bad after all because Death can’t cause sickness; only Life.
So I will wait, my potato mush until they are gone, daddy, Auntie Rae and Grandma Joe
To the seaside fare where for a moment they can escape my poisonous fumes that
Strap them of air. I will lie naked and cramped and grab these two poles that hold together the canopy where daddy and I planned to grow old.
Come now. And I will push and push. Legs apart. Hands on the pole. And push, and push and push and then it will be over…this sickness of life. Push until it’s over and you and I are no more.
Ol’ Mary eased up on her shoulders and saw Jesus—still on his Julie mango, sitting in the lap of his father. Ol’ Mary screamed and screamed, horrified by what she saw in the face of God and horrified at what was taking place between them. O’l Mary saw the face of God as if it were something resurrected from the depths of hell. They found her next morning, cigarette dangling from her mouth, and a dandy’s scarf tightened around her throat.
Friday, October 31, 2008
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