episodes from A HalfMan Dreamer
Manitou who wish to know the matter with us drifting snow? "Sleeping Bear" curls in its six thousand year hibernation four hundred fifty feet above "What if it wakes up mad?" he asked Nadia as they approached the pine and scrub held flanks of the coma snared beast. A breeze was lifting off the dune carrying some sand, some pebbles. She thought about this sense of humor foreign to her, the world so unpolished in its scarcities he'd come from, and this quick polished watchfulness holding the irritants up for examination. It didn't try to conquer what it saw, but it constantly checked a scent without asking for comfort. Its absence of callousness aroused her. Were the men like this with each other and if they were what about the women, a woman's business which included men? Nadia heard the question trail off in her dead lover's voice. The archaeologist when she was on her farm near the town of The he looked out at the scoured horizon, smoothed by the remnant afterwinds, the ice stretching its whispers, its unfinished work. The luster of the deep water caught her. She had been so adept with women. Loved the smell of tits, the lingering blood softness of pussy and sweat stranded behind a tense, lightly bitten ear, as much as she would allow herself to say it, "as any man," not really wanting the parody and its containment. Her life as this woman had been filled with devotion, kindness, as the desperations and anguish wove themselves, set the days in a clarity, friendships, apartments to be gutted, re-designed, skills shared and watched over, "faggots" and their awarenesses creating a tangible susceptibility, trying any of the human fruit on for size and then smear it with good precise gossip that touched the funniest music and the funniest shit about stealing, drugs, sex binges, shopping, hysteria, and falling into a million pieces; call it style, fragile, sad, and brave. She thought her preference was a "sickness" in the beginning and when it wouldn't go away, wouldn't treat her like other sicknesses might, that her illness came from pleasure and desire, then what was she supposed to think? Whose sickness was it exactly with its prizes of humiliation and shame? True illness, the ill in being stripped of their lives and reduced mercilessly, as her friend had been--Nadia in trying to search for blame fixed on their love, could not in the moment of her own agony and bewilderment keep the tide of the "straight" world from its automatic immersions. It had shamed Nadia and the archaeologist in those days of her dying, for the weeks left, brought them both to an enkindling intimacy where the other illness, the one which wounded far more definitely, and its pretenses were allowed to crumble. Wesley, so soon after the archaeologist's death, had appeared as a "gift" but Nadia saw almost immediately the mockery and self deception and understood the dignity they had both struggled for. ***** "No sanddollars," Wesley said, "not a one," as he looked off the edge of the dune. Nadia hearing the comment asked what a sanddollar might be. "It's a little like a piece of Wesley, when he flirted like this, had an aloof distant attraction, that turned like a Queen Anne's Lace, she thought, in the wind. And why that flower and not another. Stick the stem in blood, and it would rise, stain the laced intricacy, turning the soaked flower face outward to other hungers. "Are sanddollars like a Queen Anne's Lace?" She wanted to taunt him, to hate him for the confusion he'd brought her. "If the one alive's as much like a skeleton as the one that's dead, then they might both be the same that way." The wind had stopped blowing and Nadia, anxious at that moment, noticed as Wesley kneeled down in front of her, took his forefinger, as he had seen that father of his do so many times when conversation and what it'd carry wasn't enough, and drew the face of a sanddollar, the disk with its central five leafs marked there. "It's skeletons that wash up on shore. If you pick'em up too hard they'll crumble like a ripe potato chip. But if you don't claw at'em they're like some little secret you can take home." Wesley looked up at Nadia and didn't say a thing then. But he remembered what he and his sister had learned from their mother about the sanddollar on one of those excursions she'd taken them on - it was the "shadow of the child" with its beating arms of light, and the hordes of the dead, all of them, could enter even the smallest disk for their midday rest as they were chased and eaten by the sun. The information as it grew in him seemed to be about a people who, though they were gentle and easily exterminated, were far more dangerous in their stories than the conqueror would ever guess, and Wesley didn't know exactly what this might bring him, and if he could properly carry it as a man, he didn't know this either. He loved the roses, the hard knowledge which came with them, but he didn't know finally what had stunned his father and whether or not his mother had meant to break him and break herself. Her prolonged hostilities and the way she let them settle on their land, their house, the roses her husband touched every day in his fight for their survival honed her and her violence like her leather gloves, nearly seamless, allowed no room for counter agitation. What conclusions for Wesley could there be about women, his mother's pride, elegance, her sense of persistence as a woman turning slowly toward a motionlessness in herself, summoning no duration. Nadia looked out from where they stood and in every direction there was the sky, this fresh water ocean beneath it, the "Bear" poised equally in the emptiness, drawing all that might swirl around it into the scale of its sleep, its riddles falling under the grindstone of its dreams. She was afraid almost to say anything, the fear of having it be a stutter, she could not hold the withdrawal marking women like an invisible tattoo wherever they have been born and gone numbering each woman with a disguise. The stutter, though it wanted everything for itself, needed irritation. But she knew she was more than a little upset. Stutters were another way of saying she liked Wesley and was afraid to stumble over anything, especially the wrong words. It was Wesley's half whisper that got her. That and the way he touched her fingers asking if she was gonna be OK? Nadia had never asked herself how long a man stays around, women or men, the throw of those dice was probably the same. "All this sand and sky," Wesley quietly announced, "and not one piece of grass to chew on either." How was she, Nadia, to take such a comment, suddenly grown afraid of words as she had. And now this easy flow from Wesley, quick and exact to catch the simplest breeze. "Wesley?" Nadia suddenly asked. It was only one word but she was surprised she hadn't stumbled over it. In the absence of a blade of grass Wesley took some sand, cupped his hand, and let it slip through as a wavering spray. "Take me to a motel." Now it was five words. She hadn't done a bad job. Read more of A HalfMan Dreamer
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