Happy Mother's Day!

A Short Story

A Short Story, by Katie Williams: 

No work, no Skype dates or lunch meetings, no phone calls to make or errands to run; the whole afternoon was wide open.  Just her and the sun in the clear blue sky with nothing to do... except salvage the remains of a relationship she’d shattered into a thousand tiny pieces the day before with just one fist.

It wasn’t a punch but rather the unclenching of her hand that did it.  When she released her grip on a bouquet of flowers and let them fall to the sidewalk, a silent mushroom cloud rose from where they struck the ground filling the air with a gas so toxic that the only thing left to do was walk away before tears started falling.  And that’s what she did.  She walked away.  He had intended them as a gift and she, in her childish pride in an act of defiance, abandoned them on the side of the road as if they were a smoldering bomb spewing poisonous fumes.

She didn't throw them down, she simply refrained from intervening with gravity.  It was typical of her to be so blameless and detached, merely allowing nature to take its destructive course while shrugging her shoulders and claiming uninvolvement.  The worst enemies are the ones that do not fight.  You cannot wrestle a dove.

                                  *                                    *                                   *

The key to productivity is finding something you want to do even less than all the other things you have to do, thus rendering the To Do list a selection of relatively appealing procrastination alternatives.  In her nothing-to-do afternoon, she managed to bus across town, leave her business card with several potential clients, sit in the park, listen to an entire Pink Floyd album and write a poem on the back of a napkin.   Every time she reached for her cellphone to make The Call she would remember that email she had to send or the garbage that hadn’t been taken out or that granola bar she’d been wanting to eat.  The entire day slipped though the cracks of a chain of distractions.  She leapt from one to the next like stepping stones in quicksand. 

She decided she couldn’t just call.  She needed to think, to plan, to organize.  She needed a five-section outline with bullet points, a flow chart with arrows and boxes to make sense out of the scrambled Rubik’s cube that was her brain: the red angry squares next to the orange guilty square; the self-righteous green squares lined up on the same side as the blue regretful ones; the white apathy square appearing randomly and inconsistently on all sides. 

So she took out a piece of paper and a pen and started to write.  Then she crossed out what she had written and started over.  Then she traced over the word “Stressed” until it was too ominously bold and black and she had to scratch it out and write it again normally.   She eventually reached the edge of the page and declared it good enough.  

She dialed.
"Hello?"

“Hi.”
"Hi."

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“Ok.”

Mayday.  That was not included in the script.  They both knew this was about more than just yesterday's incident.

“Maybe we can talk about it later?”

“I’m free now actually.”

Bite the bullet, she told herself, just get it over with.  

She read her script from her notes and that’s exactly what it came out sounding like: a recital of a dry monologue on an empty poorly-lit stage with a bad microphone and no one in the audience.  He listened... or rather, he didn’t interrupt.  Once he started talking she realized he hadn’t heard a single word.  Thus the conversation spiraled in toilet bowl circles, rapidly decreasing in circumference as they approached the abyss of their fatal end.  

“So what now?” he asked clinging to the slippery porcelain surface.  

She couldn’t open her mouth for fear that the small animal nesting in her throat would escape.  So she curled her lips between her teeth, raised her eyebrows and shook her head slowly.  

I don’t know. 

The things we do for free t-shirts...

My foot kicked at the steering wheel but my back was already pressing into the corner of the passenger side door as two zombies crawled up on the hood of the car, blood dripping down the glass every time they beat their gnarled hands on the windshield.

“Now scream out loud,” the photographer instructed me.  It was awkward but I obeyed, letting out three high pitched wails in the abandoned junk yard lot wondering what the pedestrians on the other side of the wall might think was going on.

But then again, I wasn’t really sure what was going on.  Several months ago (Halloween, to be exact) some friends and I heard about a zombie parade happening in downtown Bogotá.  We went, got our faces painted, and groaned our way down the central avenue with 5,000 other living dead people, claws outstretched, feet dragging.  For kicks, I uploaded a short video slideshow on Youtube and (I must have been the only one because) last week an email appeared in my inbox from “zombiesbogota@gmail.com” telling me that I’d won the video contest.  I was unaware I had entered, but who’s going to complain about a free t-shirt?

This morning I showed up at the cemetery entrance at 10:00 sharp, as instructed, to receive my prize.  I waited for a half an hour until I heard a voice behind me, “Katie?”

A high-class Colombian Dracula wearing patent leather shoes and Louis Vuitton sunglasses greeted me.  Expensive gel held his dark wavy hair off his face that was framed by the pointy collar of his knee-length leather trench coat.  His hand retracted early from our handshake to grab his vibrating cellphone in his pocket and after a brief one-sided conversation he slipped the phone back into his jacket and muttered to me and to no one, “I can’t stand it when people are late.”

I refrained from commenting.  

We entered the cemetery and it was explained to me that we were going to take a few “action” photos and I would receive the prints as a part of my prize.  OK no problem, I thought, it can’t take too long...

The Count was accompanied by two similarly sinister sidekicks also sporting sunglasses and leather jackets, one with a silver stud in his left earlobe the other with a pencil-thin beard stenciled across his chin connecting his sideburns.  While the four of us waited in front of the mausoleum for the zombie models to arrive they puffed down about three packs of cigarettes, guffawing smokey comments about last night’s rager between inhales. 

“It was intense man, I almost got my lights knocked out.”

“Yeah dude, I didn’t get back until like four in the morning.”

“Smoke?” the Count asked looking at me behind his dark lenses.

“No thanks,” I said, occupying my hands with my cellphone debating whether or not it was worth the effort to wedge my way into their semi-conversation with a hilarious joke about hangovers or an intriguing question about where the party had been.  

Thankfully my mental coin toss was interrupted by the cemetery security guard who came to kick us out.  No vampires allowed, or photos for that matter.  The begging didn’t work.  The bribe didn’t work.  The explanation about being with the blonde American tourist didn’t work.  So they trudged their fancy shoes back to the entrance and decided to go to the junk yard. 

The zombies and the apocalypse cop met us there and I spent the next two hours being chased after, grabbed at, stabbed, axed, bitten and rescued--all in freeze frame.  It was awesome.  Not exactly how I had planned to spend my Sunday afternoon but with free lunch and a glass of whisky included, it wasn’t so bad.  

And, of course, the free t-shirt. 

Apocolypse

I have a sneaking feeling that my roommates think I’m insane...

...which, as of late, may not be such an inconceivable diagnosis. 

I can’t imagine what life on earth would be like if everyone really believed in the 2012 apocalypse because living in a world with a definitive end does bizarre things to the human psyche.  When you have your existence (your job, your house, your friends, your daily routines) and you have a date (June 20th) on which all of those things will cease to be a part of your life, things look different.  It feels like swimming across a reservoir that is being drained.  You can keep striving, keep pushing, keep giving everything you have... or you could just float.  The end will be the same: you standing, wet at the bottom of an empty pit wondering where to walk to next. 

Apathy.  Detachment.  Futility.

I’ve stopped eating meals (unless it’s for a restaurant review).  I just snack compulsively throughout the day because indulging in the millions of sweet and salty treats that you can’t find in the States seems like the most valuable way to spend my time.  I’m too embarrassed to be seen eating a bag of fried plantains at 8:00 in the morning so I sneak them into my room, close the door and eat them next to the window so that the traffic noise will drown out the crunching (sign #1 for my roommates’ diagnosis).  Cups of cereal have quickly descended in rank from a luxury to a habit to an addiction.  What before I only enjoyed as a guest in someone else’s house now I consume as a prerequisite for any form of productive work: preparing class, writing a review, editing photos, updating websites... all must be performed with mug and spoon in hand.

I’ve become anti-social.  The thought of going out or meeting new people sounds about as appealing as going for a jog in a hamster wheel.  

Every time I climb the steps to my apartment I am praying that there won’t be light shining from the crack under the door.  Coming home to an empty apartment feels like biting into a melty bar of dark chocolate--I am torn between wanting to just sit and savor the stillness or to feverishly devour the opportunity, throw my bag on the floor, my coat on the chair, raid the fridge,  spill the milk and not wipe it up right away, listen to Lady Gaga on the loud speakers while making phone calls while checking my email/facebook/couchsurfing/twitter/and reddit accounts.  That way, when my roommates come home I can be doing something “chill” like drinking tea while writing in my journal or watching my goldfish eat the rainbow flake food floating at the top of the tank.  

Walking into an inhabited apartment feels like getting into a hot tub that’s only luke warm.  Your body anticipates something relaxing (coming home) but once you’re in it’s actually kind of uncomfortable.  It’s not bad enough to make a fuss over but it’s just unpleasant enough that you can’t really focus on anything and you feel constantly distracted or in need of a distraction (like a cup of cereal, for example).  Sparking a conversation feels like sparking a fire on a desert island.  Too much work.  I’d rather be cold.  Of course if one of them initiates a conversation, I play along--engaged, smiling, participating, sharing.  And then afterwards I feel like I need a nap (or a cup of cereal). 

There are three common reactions to apocalypses:

1. Crime

2. Depression

3. Carpe Diem

(I refer to the end of my Fulbright year as an apocalypse not to be dramatic but because it is, essentially the end of my present world and reality as it exists right now.)

I’m over shoplifting and I don’t want to spend my last two months in Colombia being a gluttonous introvert so I think it’s time I move on to option number three and seize the day! That may or may not involve eating plantain chips at 8:00 in the morning, but it’s the new attitude that counts.

I'll know it when I see it

I will skip through more than thirty songs on my iPod’s shuffle mode before finding something I want to listen to.  

In the past three days I’ve visited four different gourmet restaurants, none of which I am going to include on my website for innovative gastronomy in Bogotá. 

In the market I buy one of each fruit, even though it’s more expensive than buying a pound of just one or two varieties. 

I don’t watch movies because the thought of dedicating two hours to just one thing overwhelms me with indecision. 

My boots have holes in them and my purse has a broken strap but, despite dozens of fashion retail stores on my street, I haven’t found adequate replacements. 

I have a problem.  It might be ADD.  Or just general neurosis.  There are two general ways of diagnosing this psychosis:

A.  Fear of failure.  The word “settle” makes me sick to my stomach and the thought of precious minutes of life being vacuumed away by something less than amazing is depressing.  This phobia of making the “wrong” choice or “wasting” time renders me incapable of choosing any one thing and makes me a compulsive mind-changer. 

B. High confidence in my own judgement.  I am guarding an inexplicable nugget of faith in the existence of the Ideal (and my ability to find it).   I cannot seem to outgrow the romantic--perhaps naïve--notion that somewhere out there, there is the perfect song, the best movie, the coolest restaurant and the Cinderella shoes.  Until I find it I will go buzzing about my life picking and poking sporadically at a little bit of everything like a bumble bee on amphetamines.

I could claim that my lack of emotional attachments results from a pursuit of Nirvana through the Eight Fold Path of disassociation with the material world... but I am actually just a robot.  Where normal people feel grief and anxiety when separating from familiar environments and relationships, I see each opportunity as a California roll on the sushi conveyor belt of life, to be taken (if appetizing enough), experienced and enjoyed until moving on to the tempura and edamame.  This is not easy to explain to humans.  

My friends are confused as to why I would want to leave an amazing city with fabulous people and move to a state where I don’t even have any family.  My colleagues wonder why I would abandon the opportunity to make a more-than-decent salary in order to go to a place where I don’t have a job (yet) and will likely pay over $800 in rent.  A person who I care deeply for doesn’t understand why I seem unaffected by our impending separation.  I ask myself what it is, exactly, that I’m looking for... 

The answer is I don’t know.  But I’ll know it when I see it. 

Third time's a charm

(This will reflect poorly on me...)

In Colombia phones like mine are known as flechas (arrows) because "cada Indio tiene uno" (every Indian’s got one).  (That might be racist.)  My phone is the cheapest you can find, but it is trustier than a Swiss Army knife.  Transitioning from my emailing/scrabble-playing/mind-reading smart phone was hard at first, but I have grown to love my little flecha.  Although recently I’ve been a little careless with her...

INSTANCE #1: The Nameless Hero

Shoot, I’m going to be late, I realized when my watch alarm went off and I was still in my house.  I reached into my jacket pocket to send a text apologizing for my delay and my fingers grasped at empty fabric.   My other hand instinctively went through the routine patting sequence: jeans pockets, back pockets, backpack side pocket.  No dice.  My eyes were simultaneously executing Operation Cross-Check darting from the dining table, to the desk, to the pile of laundry on the floor.  Nada. My brain was replaying the previous two hours in reverse, scanning the mental recordings for clues as to the last known location of my phone.  To no avail.

So I asked my roommate to call my phone to see if I could hear it ring somewhere and to my surprise, someone answered.  It was a boy, or a man, or an adolescent-ish male.  It was pouring down rain outside but I told him I would bike to the gas station near where he was to recover the phone.  On the way I bought a giant chocolate bar and some other candies and prepared myself to even flirt a little with the kid for being the savior of my social and professional communication life.  

I waited on the corner, getting drenched by passing buses until he appeared, phantom like, on his bike.  I hardly let him get a word out before I started gushing my thanks and appreciation.  He shyly accepted my gifts and then pedaled away, disappearing silently into the rain. 

INSTANCE #2

I don’t particularly like malls, but I needed some alone time outside the house and it was 9:30pm on a Sunday so everything else was closed.  Other than the fluorescent lighting and echoey music, the lounge couches set up outside the stores are comfortable enough, if for nothing else than their anonymity.  The mall-ies are so entranced by the lights and colors gleaming from the store fronts that my sofa island in the middle of the wide hallway is like a room of two-way mirrors, me looking out and everyone else seeing right through me.

I had been ensconced in my invisibility bubble for almost an hour before a middle aged man strode right up to me and popped it.  

“Excuse me,” he said with a strange grin, “Are you American?”

Really?, I thought.  Here I am, minding my own business on a mall couch at 10:30 at night and this guy is going to come ask me to give his daughter English classes. 

“Yes,” I said, smiling in a plastic way that I hoped was conveying polite noninterest in this conversation. 

“Do you speak English?”  

I knew it. “Yes...”

“Do you have a cell phone?” 

This guy meant business.  “Yes...”

“Did you use the bathroom on the second floor a while ago?”  

Now I was confused, and slightly creeped out.  How long had this guy been stalking me just to ask me about speaking English? “Um, yes... Why?”

“What is your phone like?”

All of the sudden a light bulb went off in my head.  I saw the flashback of me setting my phone on the back table of the bathroom stall.  I suddenly became much more friendly with the man, who--although dressed in normal clothes--had a curly chord coming from an earpiece that I hadn’t noticed earlier. 

“Oh, yes! It’s small and black and really cheap looking.  Did you find it?”

He explained to me that a woman had found it in the restroom and turned it in.  He noticed it was all in english so he reviewed the security cameras looking for a gringa (apparently I was the only blonde person in the mall that night) and he tracked me down. 

After signing a few forms and chatting--recounting the events leading up to our encounter, talking about Colombia, etc--he gave me the phone and I said if he or anyone in his family ever needed English classes that he had my number. 

INSTANCE #3: El Sequestro

I dialed my number and listened hopefully for a vibration sound to buzz from a hidden corner somewhere in my room.  The ringing tone sounded flatly in the speaker, but the room was silent.  I felt a drop of dread.  Then suddenly,

“Hello?” 

“Hello, hi!” I stammered, caught of guard.  “Um, I think you have my phone.” Stating the obvious. 

I was immediately relieved that the voice was an older woman, surely a mother.  I imagined her in a pair of clunky Latin grandma heels walking with quick short strides down 13th street where I had been riding my bike that morning.  I imagined her taking a second glance at what could have been a black rock on the sidewalk and then bending over to see that it was actually the phone that had slipped from my back pocket without my noticing. I imagined her fretting over the pour soul that had lost it and pondering all morning of ways to find the owner.

I asked her where I could meet her to take it off her hands, feeling so lucky and grateful I was already thinking about inviting her to lunch.  She sounded a bit confused about what the next step should be, but then out of the blue she asked, “But how do you plan on thanking me for my honesty?”

“Excuse me?”

“I am a very honest person.”

“Oh.”  I didn’t feel like taking her out to lunch any more.  “You mean money?”

The image of the concerned grandmother in my mind's eye evolved into a Disney villain with a crooked nose and a wart. 

I offered $10.000 pesos which offended her.  She suggested that I take the next hour to reflect and consider what my phone really meant to me.  Click.  

The Disney villain image evolved into a Matriarch Mafiosa smoking a cigar in a dark room, empty except for the leather chair she was sitting in, a table with an old rusty phone, and my cellphone--tied up, gagged, black eyed and bloody nosed.

Sixty minutes later I called her back, with the desire to plead for her to set off the ring tone of my phone so I could hear it, so that I knew it was alive and OK.  

“$15.000.”

“$20.000.”

“Fine.”

We arranged to meet on a public corner in twenty minutes.  No police.  I arrived first, scanning every 50+ female that walked by until finally I saw her--hair perm, nice purse, designer sweater.  You can’t judge a book by its cover but this lady certainly didn’t look like she was in desperate need of $20.000 pesos.  She came accompanied by her crony, another elderly woman, tall and thin with short grey hair and a dignified steel glare that said, “What we are doing is perfectly fair and noble.”

“Do you have my phone?”

“Do you have the money?”

“Show me the phone.”

“You might run away with it.”

And that would be within my right, I wanted to say.  But finally they Crony backed up a few steps, reached into her deep bag and gave me a peek of the ransom victim. 

Then they had the audacity to whip out a handwritten contract promising not to go the cops.  It didn’t mention anything about the black mail fee.  I took the paper and wrote, “This is bullshit and extortion” (in English) on the bottom and put my big official John Hancock underneath. 

We made the exchange.  Before we parted ways I said, “I just hope that if the same thing happens to you someone does you the same favor.”

But, to be honest, the person who needs to learn the lesson is obviously me.  But I think the third time’s the charm. 

Close Encounters of a different kind, part 2

In the morning at Halem’s house I tried to sleep as long as I could to put off the inevitable morning hug but my bladder, full with the water from the infamous chalice and the four herbal mates we drank during the ceremony the night before, was not collaborating.  In the bathroom there were only two items: a strangled tube of toothpaste and a bottle of "Intimate Feminine Cream" on top of a lidless seatless toilet.  I did not even want to know.

Halem prepared breakfast: a plate of papaya and cucumber arranged in a precise crop circle formation served with cold coffee water (presumably to avoid brain scrambling from the microwave radiation).  He prayed.  We ate.  And then I sneezed.

His atenas perked up like a metal detector over a gold mine.  "Hmm, you are unwell.  I have a present for you.  Come."  Back to the Ceremony Room.  

The curing therapy started with rhythmic finger taps on my face, shoulders and back.  “Is there some pain in here?" he asked, jabbing his pointer into my kidney.  

"Yeah."  Now there is.

"Hmm... I had a feeling."

The tapping evolved into a full body massage.  At that point I was 100% certain that Halem was weird and 95% certain that he was not going to rob, rape or murder me, which are the three most important characteristics of a masseuses.   So despite the apparent awkwardness of the situation, I mentally shrugged my shoulders and enjoyed the free spa treatment.  

“I have another present for you,” he said afterwards.  His abounding generosity was starting to overwhelm me.   He handed me his backpack, grabbed his guitar and signaled for me to follow him as we power-walked to the bus station.  On the bus, I was privileged to listen to conspiracy theories about Princess Diana and stories about chatting it up with Viggo Mortison and hanging out with Manu Chau.  I refrained from asking which of the stories took place in this dimension and which of them occurred on other planets.  

Suddenly: “Close your eyes.”  He huddled me with a side hug and started mumbling something to the universe about love and plants.  Thankfully my previous involvement with evangelicals of the Charismatic flavor has desensitized me to random public prayer. 

Once we arrived at our destination (a little mountain town above Pasto), we convened with a small band of flowy-pants earth people, dreadlocked and pierced, carrying miniature instruments and a box of arroz con leche to sell in the plaza.  Before introducing me to each brother and sister, Halem ceremoniously squirted all of us with his travel-size spray bottle of eucalyptus water.  We sat in a powwow around the table and sang two-chord songs about our product.

“Arroz con leche...Arroz con leche... It’s so delicious and good... For only 1.000 pesos you can have it...”  Conventional poetic rhyme is against their beliefs.

“I like your friends,” I lied at the end of the day. 

“Yeah, they're better when we’re all in the stars together.”

And that is my problem with drugs and religion (in excess). 

In the minds of the hyper-spiritual, the Utopian world takes precedent over this one.   The present reality becomes an inconvenient stepping stone, a mere portal, to the perfect celestial realm.   This world is a boring and sinful place from which one should desire escape.  It is unpsychedelic and unholy.  It is a trap, an illusion, a cage.  And all of the unenlightened people who live within it, unaware of the other-earthly Paradise, are tragic prisoners that need to be rescued.  If the poor souls do not wish to be rescued they are to be pitied, or even condemned. 

But I am not convinced that the addicted or the dogmatic are any more free than the nonbelievers.