Brushing Away the Dirt, Part 2

This continues a story started in the previous post.

It started after Grandma died. I was 14 and I missed her a lot. She had always been quite the presence in our tiny home - sitting in that corner, sewing our ratty clothes, telling stories about devils or spirits, and cracking dirty jokes. Her husband had been gone some twenty years when I was born, and I think my birth gave her a new, comfortable role to fall into. Not a widow anymore, but a grandmother. We were tied together that way. And when she died, I missed her.

Our crowded house, so loud during the day, dipped into silence at night. A week after we buried Grandma, I crept out. Tiptoed past my brother's bed and through the shared living space. I cracked the light screen door open and slipped out into the warm night.

Although the street wasn't lit, the moon was bright and I easily ran along the side of the road. The cemetery was close and only a few cars flew past me, blazing headlights and screaming merengue.

You know, I've always loved our cemetery. Lush green and red leaves hug the graves, and it seemed like a fitting entrance to Paradise. I wondered how Grandma felt, and I hurried over to her new tombstone.

It was new but already it wasn't shiny. As usual, we'd had rain storms daily, and a few had brought down waves of soil from the cliffs above the graveyard. So her tombstone, like all the others, was dirty. What a shame, I thought. I pulled my nightshirt off my head and used it to wipe the stone clean. I'll admit, it was a bit of a thrill standing there bare-chested in the warm night.

I put my shirt back on and kneeled down to whisper to the gravestone. "I miss you Grandma," was all I could muster, both because I was a kid with not much of a way with words, and because I was trying not to cry. To distract myself, I looked at her name carved, not all that well I'll say, in the stone. The letters were still dirty and so, one by one, I traced my finger inside them, scooping out the grains of island dirt.

When I cleared the 's,' the last letter in her name, again I told my grandma how much I missed her. To my surprise, she answered back.

"Good lord child I've only been gone a week."

Brushing Away the Dirt, Part 1

My name is Maria. Named after the Virgin Mary, of course. She and I don't have much in common, but I like to think we share at least one thing. Mary, virgin mother of Jesus and wife in name - but not body - to Joseph, led a secret life. Her marriage was a sham, if a tender one, and her son was a mystery. She had a different understanding of God from every single one of her neighbors. She, a humble, poor woman, was the mother of God! Yet she couldn't say a thing to anyone. I'd bet even Joseph didn't know much of it, though maybe she whispered in the ear of the infant Jesus. I can't even imagine what that much secrecy felt like. A heavy blanket covering her body? A brick wall dividing her soul? I don't know.

Like Mary, I have a small secret life of my own. It couldn't be any other way, I think. Perhaps it's just the legacy of my name, but I think that everyone should have a secret life. It protects us, keeps some part of our self safe, clean from the scrutiny and insinuations of others. In our secret life, we know what we do is for ourselves, or maybe for God. Now, I don't deceive myself. The presence of a secret life by no means predicates goodness. What are murderers but those who live secret lives? I know the tragedy that such secret manifestation of self can wreck. But that isn't an argument against secret life. People come in all types, and anyone can distort beauty.

But enough philosophizing. It's not like me, usually. Only on this topic. I want to tell you about my secret life, but I can tell I'm delaying the action of turning it over, relinquishing it to the anarchy of others. Still I remind myself, I am about to die, and this secret life will soon be of little use to me. Maybe it will be of use to you, if as entertainment only. And where I come from, we live off entertainment. Sometimes there's not much more to go on.

Continue to Part 2.

A Snippet

This is from a story I recently told to pass the time during a car trip. Story probably isn't the right word, for that implies more coherence than it had, but I can't think of anything better. I was particularly fond of this part, so I'm capturing it here. Apologies if it doesn't make sense, but feel reassured that in context it wouldn't have made much more sense.

The two rabbit guards brought the chipmunk to a hollow log.

"Go on," they said, indicating for him to enter. "We stay here; your path lies ahead."

Nodding, the chipmunk straightened his knapsack and entered the log. The entry was overhung with leaves, and it quickly became dark inside. He inched his way forward. After a few steps, he collided with a mass of feathers.

"Excuse me!" harumphed the feathers.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you," the chipmunk apologized.

"Indeed."

"I, um, am looking to pass through the log," the chipmunk offered.

"Are you? Well."

"I've been invited to see the Badger King."

"The Badger King? Yes, come along then."

The chipmunk followed the sound of feathers scraping against the log. They soon came upon some luminescent drawings upon the curved log walls. Glowing in strange yellow paint, they depicted a pheasant holding a goblet, turtles running on small strips of bark, squirrels balancing on tightropes and, most strangely, a crowd of animals, including fawns and tigers and beetles, gaping at an exalted badger.

"These are wonderful drawings," observed the chipmunk. In the light from the walls, he could see the form of his guide, a large pheasant.

"Why, ho, thank you," guffawed the pheasant in mock modesty. "I painted them myself. I am the keeper of this log shrine."

"Shrine?"

"Yes, of course."

"Where do you get the paint?"

"The fireflies. There is a basin at the top of the log, a stone bowl. The fireflies, in their frenzied devotion to my shrine, land there and, using a few pebbles strewn about, take their lives. Right there, in the basin. I use their sacrifice as paint."

"Oh," commented the chipmunk, at a loss. "That sounds, er, dedicated."

The Previous Occupant

This is fourth in a series of portraits and mini stories that starts with The Word Smith. I suggest, if you're interested, reading them in order.

Ustery laughed. The red stain on the floor tickled him, although he couldn't have explained why. He leaned back against the rough counter and watched the Councilwoman flail on the floor, astonished by her own blood. The dirty little boy ran over to help her, the vagabond. Ustery was tempted to kick the boy, but didn't want to create too much trouble. For all Chayman's faults, Ustery liked him. Or didn't mind him. If someone other than him had to care for the words, Chayman was better than most.

Ustery had shoved the Councilwoman because, in a moment of fiendish emotion, he confused her with a woman he had known in life. Strange that her name escaped him, a man of words as he was, but he didn't even notice the absence. Woman she was, haughty and powerful, those forceful words shaping her more than a name could. Ustery was torn between his fascination with the pooled blood and a desire to pour himself into the "woman" word box, to feel its curves and warmth and frigid rejection. That box was, naturally, one of the oldest in the shop, its maker long perished and even his spirit dissipated.

Ustery's first secret, his shame, was that he himself had never crafted a single word box, at least not one that made its home on any shelf. Polish them, even breathe new definitions into them, he could do. Grant a new word entry into their sorority he could not. For 94 years he guarded his words, a eunuch protecting his harem, excluding interlopers and pretenders, even as he knew they needed new blood, beautiful new words.

His second secret, his pride, was that he had killed to defend his words' purity. It was no great story, merely a dark night, shattered glass, a scuffle and a warm grunt followed by the smell of death. Some emissary of some regent sought to change a definition, likely related to a trial or an inheritance, although Ustery neither knew nor cared. He had been reading late one night and heard someone break into the shop below his living quarters. Armed with a letter opener, he slew the vandal as the fool searched the shelves. Ustery dragged the body out to the river, mingling its carrion with that of the night's many other victims.

Maybe that was why the Councilwoman's blood, testifying to previous blood spilled on those wooden floors, made him smile.

The Councilwoman

This is third in a series of portraits and mini stories that starts with The Word Smith. I suggest, if you're interested, reading them in order.

Councilwoman Mirschett swept into the store, tinkling the door's tiny bell with a violence that caused Chayman to look up from his reading - the fourth volume of Hesse's Authority on Semantics of the Third Epoch. Councilwoman Mirschett caught his eye and raised both of her sculpted eyebrows in response. Before addressing him, she surveyed the shop, taking in its surprising sense of openness and light, underlined by broad pine floorboards and a thick red carpet, small like a door mat, in front of the long counter. In the corner to the left of the front door lurked a young boy, with a colorful wooden box lashed to his back, pretending to browse in a store that clearly had nothing to browse through.

She pushed back the hood of her yellow overcoat, approaching the counter. The Word Smith, dressed in his daily silk, had returned to his reading and appeared not to notice her. She cleared her voice. Nothing, except the sensation of a faint breeze. Councilwoman Mirschett shrugged and began to speak.

"Word Smith Chayman, I have business with you. Two definitions, or so."

Without looking up he trudged over to the counter.

"Just two this time, Councilwoman?"

"Likely. Do you know what he said to me, Chayman? 'Either we will build the bridge or we will not build the bridge,' he thundered! At the Council, can you imagine? What nonsense."

"Perhaps you mean effrontery, Councilwoman."

She ignored the remark.

"So of course I've come to you, Word Smith, the best in town, no, the entire district, to plumb the precise meaning of both 'build' and 'bridge.' As you might guess, I intend to discover whether I might, in fact, build the bridge without, precisely, building the bridge. Or bridge the build. Or however it comes out. You catch my meaning?" She flicked a piece of dust off her sleeve, and raised an eyebrow in question.

"Mm, perhaps. I'll get about extracting those definitions for you." He turned away from her and then paused, before spinning back. "Hey boy!" He yelled, ten years slipping from his face. "Don't touch anything! If you want help, I'll help you. Youth discount even. Just don't touch a single thing."

His mask fell back over his face and he walked off in search of 'build.' The words were grouped in meadows, where many different types of words might cluster and they all flourish, separated from the next meadow over by a thicket of wooden shelves. Chayman had first wondered why they were not sorted alphabetically, but learned, through unfortunate experience, that grouping them by their accidental letters rather than their essence caused them to dry out, to wither away. Some had even been known to die.

One hand resting on the counter, Councilwoman Mirschett watched him finger the polished word boxes on the shelves, as though divining their identity by the slant or curve of the protruding side. She curled one corner of her mouth upwards as she anticipated her coup, but quickly banished the thought, out of fear of incurring bad luck.

Just then, her hand slipped out from under her, sliding recklessly down the edge of the wooden counter as she fell to her side. The seemingly smooth surface birthed giant splinters, tearing her palm in half. She hit the floor on her hip and cried out in pain. Blood flowed from her hand, and her anxiety spiked as she watched it pump out.

The boy was at her side in an instant, offering a scrap as a bandage.

"You alright, madame? That was quite a fall."

She nodded, silently, trying to stem the blood flow. She stood, careful not to step in the blood smudge below. On the other side of the counter, Chayman waited with her first definition.

The Puppet Master

This is second in a series of portraits and mini stories that starts with The Word Smith. I suggest, if you're interested, reading them in order.

The face in his hand was a marvel of paint and carving, whose sum was a frozen expression capable of representing a dozen different emotions. Simonth was particularly proud of this puppet, his leading lady, and often removed her from her case just to wonder at her, his hand wrapped in silk so as to not soil her wood with his hands. Those same hands had birthed the puppet only two years ago, but two years was over fifteen percent of his life, he calculated, so he felt justified in feeling that it was an eternity.

Eternity seemed often on Simonth's mind these days. As he raked in the payments from his shows, he wondered if his youth could possibly fund his eternity. As he carved a new puppet, or danced them through a new show, he wondered how long their shared legacy would last. He yearned for fame, he knew he deserved it. He just wondered how long he would have to work to ensure it. He intended not just to ensure it, but to cement it.

While it was commonly accepted that boys made the best puppeteers, and men made the worst, Simonth had decided he would remain a puppeteer into adulthood and beyond. His soaring success after just four years - a full 25 percent of his life, he figured - had persuaded him that such a duration was possible. Even fated, he told himself. Why else would the Neurstra have deigned to grant him with such skill, if it hadn't intended for him to bend the world's rules to that skill?

In the whispers of his darkest thoughts, Simonth hated the Neurstra. Hated the shadows between all his cells where the priests said Neurstra lurked, shaping the world. Hated that someone, something else could weave his body. But Simonth feared giving voice to those thoughts and tried to silence them, to keep them from the Neurstra's reach.

So he plied his trade and planned for his future, intending to discover the road already laid for him. One day, while visiting the Word Smith's shop to look up 'calumny,' of which he had been accused, Simonth decided to look up 'adulthood.' More accurately, not wanting to pay the look-up fee for a word he felt to be quite obvious, he decided to negotiate a re-definition. He had heard of that happening. Or, at a minimum, he could have an alternate definition inserted. Just a little wrinkle, a small exception, slipped into the word.

The Word Smith

Chayman relished the passing of time. The more hours that spooled past on fate's spinning wheel, the more time he had with his words, and the more he learned. He had not come to his trade easily; when his father had announced Chayman's apprenticeship to the Word Smiths Guild, his child self had screamed and launched tantrum after tantrum. Chayman had, like so many boys in his neighborhood of crooked narrow streets, hoped of being apprenticed to the ride masters or the fire bearers. Even the light-wielding wizards of the Fiber Optics Guild would have been preferable. But the economic necessity of unloading child number four and his father's provision of a cheese wheel to the Word Smith Guild chartermaster sealed Chayman's fate. It wasn't until twenty years later, after days spent cobbling wooden word boxes and nights spent poring over endless dictionaries, when Chayman opened his first shop that he felt a tiny twinge of excitement.

Six decades beyond that day, Chayman still spent every morning pulling open the bamboo shutters of that same shop. He could mark his own small blood stains on the wooden floors, and could differentiate them from the blood spilled that cold morning from the veins of the Councilwoman. He could remember which nick in his worktable corresponded to the construction of which word box - an easier feat than perhaps one would think, given the relatively few words he had permitted entry to his shelves. And he could, for a few of those older words, tell the interested browser when was the last time, decades ago, that he had slid that word box from its shelf. Sometimes it saddened him to see those grand dames fall into disuse, but most days he accepted it with magnanimity, enjoying his privileged position as caretaker for the old, fragile words.

For truly, that's what it meant to be a Word Smith. Each day he hung his guild's motto outside his storefront, naturally preferring the advertisement of a sentence over the visual allure of a showcase window.

"Words are our tools. We have to take care of them." - C. Mejia

After having repeated that mantra thousands of times with his bruised knees against cold stone floors in the Guild's rectory, Chayman had felt it creep into his heart and overtake him with its simple poetry. Each word box that he built, shaping each hollow letter into a unified wooden word, capable of holding all the meaning they would place into it, was stamped with that motto. All of the word boxes he inherited from Ustery, who had worked in this store until the day he died, bore the same motto. The Guild dedicated their lives to it.

Chayman, being not quite old but certainly not young, and with his lungs bearing the testament of his youthful indulgence in jade weed, expected that his life had been fully dedicated to the motto and foresaw no more than two decades of future dedication. Of course, as we know, he was rather mistaken in that prediction.


* Credit for the Word Smith Guild's motto goes to this author's wonderful co-worker; many thanks for his insight and inspiration.