Down on the banks of the creek below her backyard, she is allowed to get lost. Mama said so. "Go, get lost." So she did. She finds a flat boat on the bank that probably washed down from one of the new people next door. Mama thinks they're ruining the neighborhood but the little girl likes them because they pass by on the boat quiet and let her watch.

She pushes at one bank then the other with a rusted oar. In the middle the nettles can't reach her and make her skin sing horrible songs.

When the river flattens at the dam, there is nowhere else to go. She tries to make music on her way home. The words she makes never fit.

The first thing Mama does is scream. Mama screams at the little girl with weeping skin. The girl starts to cry, too. That's when Mama leaves to her bedroom. A drawer drags open. In it the two things she needs: to hurt and to forget. Mama bumps into the jamb on the way back, and stops in the middle of the room and sways next to where the girl is still crying.

"Why are you doing this to me?" Mama says. She looks down at the girl, and then with one slow blink shifts her eyes out the window. They stand there like that, Mama lost in the sun that stamps out everything and the little girl crying in unchanged song. Mama was beginning to forget. "Stop it, enough."

And she does. The little girl stops crying and she looks up at Mama. "How old am I?"

Mama looks over from the window, looks down into the girl's wet face, and shakes her head. She looks back out the window and then looks at the girl. "Four."

"Okay." The girl's eyes do not move. "Then when else am I going to cry?"

The weakness has gone
out of me--
the rain falls in punctuation.
A thousand periods
snuff out the heart
in slow disorder.
A thousand periods
and no ellipsis.

a_a

It is work for when they are not home. They are not home and that is just as well because there is work to be done that must be done when they are gone. No one is paying him for results anyway. He looks after the garden that is not a garden and the fruit trees that make little fruit for the forgettable animals and he looks after and he looks out through the rising heat as it warps the work of man in the earth. The hose is black and mouthless, and he stands before it when it does not follow him or it trips on stairs or falls into kink. He looks back and sometimes he kicks it with bent revenge, a choke of his work trapped inside a rubber throat.

He misses the sound.

He brings the hose above his head to the hanging flowers and there is no water for a moment until there is and it pushes out against the sun and falls through the flowers in small trough. Standing against the weight of the rush are several proud tendrils sprouted from the beneath that was once only soil. He lets the water run there for a long while, holding one arm up with the other, moving in a gentle circle around the fist of young plants. The next hanging bunch shows more color and needs less work. He moves quickly past to the next and the next. Back he goes to the first flowers. Water falls through everything and rains from the holes of a hairy coconut shell. He walks to the others briefly and comes back, the hose coiled in debate at his feet. When the rain stops he starts it again.

You watch him in an unseeable labor, and he does not know you are there. You watch him in Canadian sound. The plants have all stopped dripping save one. You want to knock at the glass. You rise without economies and stand in front of him at the window but he does not see you from behind the dripping bush.


a_a

He says something strange and then stares at me in the doorway. I look back without a word.

"You speak Arabic?"
"Almost."
"I thought you might. You maybe look--"
"I know."
"Yes."
"Are you new?" I say.
"No. I am old."

He laughs and repeats himself to himself. He only comes in one day of the week. I must come in on all the others.

"So tired. Sleep!" he says. His head is in the corner with the cigarettes and energy shots, rolling. He looks up at me. I nod.

I'm holding a small purple cabbage when he starts up again.

"Having good day yes? How's your work?" he says.

I find the question unusual for a stranger, and I wonder where I am supposed to stop. It will make it easier to know where to start. I really think about it and when I think about it I have to admit that I have had a good day, yes, and there ought not to be anything calculated about my telling it. I tell him so much.

"What your work?" he says.

I answer and remember why I should never answer without thinking of where it ends.

"Oh! I knew this is why I ask. I am writer too!" he says. I imagine stories in a sleepless tense.

We go through badly. He tells me what he writes, and I tell him I write short stories. I am pleased with the way that sounds. Serious enough without real commitment to anything. In truth it sounds good because it came after him talking and he can't talking.

He insists on telling me his story. Then he stops.

"No I afraid of plagiarism." he says.

He pronounces it with a hard G. Like the plague. I do not correct him. He continues. The story is in English, and he recites it from memory, does a dialog much better than his speech. It is between two house pets who feel discriminated against, by the man, and the woman. One believes the dog is in on it, too. Every now and then the shopkeeper flashes a mad grin at me. Finally I laugh. He takes this as a sign I don't like the story. I tell him I love the way he is telling it.

He turns and faces the wall, steps onto a milk crate and turns around. He is fourteen feet tall, at least.

"I am not the professional writer. I just do it for me." he says. "There is too much real. I don't like this. I like imaginations."

He reaches up and touches the ceiling.

"Stories are for making small things bigger yes?"

a_a