04.03.08
Posted in Igneous Range, Dixie at 8:20 pm by Dan Jensen
Old Jacksonboro Road crosses the Savannah Highway within a half hour of Charleston. The name for this intersection is Jericho. It was once the name of a community. Today it is a crossroads on the outskirts of a town called Adams Run.
Jericho was once the site of a hotel, a post office, and a store with gas pumps. The hotel had three stories if one counts the spacious attic with dormer windows and bath. It had exterior wooden stairways, which resembled fire escapes. Around 1964, it was converted to a boys’ home by the Reconnu family. They operated the boys’ home until about 1968.
The store came equipped with a soda vending machine that would allow a mischievous boy to yank a bottle out without paying. The trick to it was not to brag to ones mother about the achievement.
The Mission returned to Carolina in mid-1970 to discover the Hotel Jericho, a bargain for a gastronomical temple, complete with guest suites and a burn pile in the back, all blackened from the last fire and wet from the last rain, with an aroma of metamorphosed plastics, rotting food, and rusted scrap metal.
It turned out the Hotel Jericho had too many hidden maintenance and repair issues, and it wasn’t easy to unload. Without sufficient income, the Mission was not able to sustain its Jericho burn-rate for long. In the wink of an eye, they packed up and left the Hotel Jericho for a little trackside house in the hamlet of Ruffin, which is little more than a railroad crossing on the Lowcountry Highway. The Mission wasn’t actually able to sell the Hotel for a couple years after it left Jericho. In the following years, the final solution seemed to have been found when it all burned down in a couple of fires.
The new location did have its luxuries. The day they arrived, Armen and Cindy discovered the new site came with its own playground: a rusty old metal swing set, an old, half-empty bottle of soda complete with an escort of hornets, and a shed in the back.
Every hot, sweaty night, freight trains would thunder by, shaking the house as they passed, and blasting through the cacophony of insect songs. The tracks, with the trestle down the way, were a temptation for wandering feet, haunted by the occasional odd shoe left to seed the imagination of a young boy. The oily, black sleepers seemed laid out to trip up the traveler, and the cool steel rails seemed like blunt blades.
Every bit as terrifying as the rails was the altogether foreign and unnatural experience that is called—with no lack of irony—kindergarten. Armen had hardly been introduced to the terror of mass education when the Mission was compelled to move on to nearby Walterboro, where he was fortunate to attend kindergarten at a small Catholic church just down a dirt road from the Mission.
The Mission was at least able to draw in some income at Walterboro, but not enough. The Mission’s kitchen and clinic served all comers. It could hardly afford to turn anyone away, but it was put under more and more pressure to do just that. Serving both whites and negros was an affront to southern whites. The Judge had not come to the South to tell anyone how to live—he had come to celebrate the South, but as an Armenian, it was difficult for him to allow himself to participate in the marginalization of a people.
The Mission was nearly compelled to return to California, but the Judge found an opportunity in the Piedmont. It was on the edge of Appalachia, in an old house with a forested canyon in the backyard, where Armen would sometimes explore. Cindy would occasionally come along, but she would unavoidably fall behind while looking out into the woods or up at the sky. She would sometimes accompany her brother when he would explore the crawl space under the house. When they found some loose bricks in the crawl space, she helped him rearrange the bricks to resemble a miniature house. The partnership ended, however, when Armen began to build small fires in their brick fortress. Cindy did not share Armen’s fondness for fire. In fact, she expressed a mortal dread of the smallest flame. It was another one of her quirks that her adoptive parents imagined might have been acquired during her time in Istanbul. At the Mission, she seemed most at home in front of the small black-and-white TV set watching westerns. She seemed transfixed by the Indians in particular.
As passionate as the Judge had become about soul food, he couldn’t manage to make a living selling soul food as food for the soul to Southerners. He’d extended and enhanced the culinary experience in unique ways, but the fact that he was a Yankee in Southern eyes seemed to always get in the way. He didn’t think of himself as a Yankee; he saw himself as an Armenian and a Fresnan and an American, but he began to realize that how he saw himself didn’t matter in the South. Recognizing this, leaks began to break through his resolve. He thought about how long it had been since he’d listened to a Giants game on KSFO. He thought about the dry bake of the Fresno summer air, and the cool, moist blanket of the Tule fog. Hearing that Willie Mays had been traded away to the New York Mets was the last straw. The Judge resolved to return to California this time as a Californian. For the first time, this would mean coming home. The Mission was packed up under an evening thunder storm, just after the mess from Cindy’s fifth birthday party was cleaned up. Kale ran off, tale between legs, to make a mess of his own in the basement. The showers fell harder, mixed with hail and with shorter intermissions, until the Mission set float and began its drift westward.
©2008 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Igneous Range at 6:45 pm by Dan Jensen
The sleepy Aegean waves licked up the white beach, warm and low. Up the shore, a cottage clung to the low shoulder of the island and howled. It howled and it screamed, and it ejected something out its flank, which began a slow ragged rotation and fell flat and motionless upon the ground.
The young man turned to the midwife, averting his eyes from the bed, and flinching under the violence of his love’s screams. The midwife handed him another bloodied rag, which fell to his feet. He picked it up and lobbed it through the doorway.
He looked out, and stepped out for some air, as the world began to sway and whiten. He spiraled downward.
He heard the frail, alien crying of infants. He heard his love humming a broken lullaby, and he woke with a jolt. He found his face to the floor. He pushed away the floor, righted himself, and turned round until he found her. She hummed euphorically, but weakly and laboriously. He held her hand. She smiled, blinked, and closed her eyes. Her neck eased as she fell into sleep. Two infants laid against her breast, braced by pillows.
The midwife sent him out for the doctor. He completed the chore, but not quickly enough.
“And Nymphodorus, in his Voyage round Asia, says that there are nowhere more beautiful women than those in Tenedos, an Island close to Troy.” —Athenaeus
Cynthia and her brother were taken into the care of different families. The couple that took Cynthia soon moved off the Island to find employment in the city, and left the boy as the last remaining Greek child of Tenedos, which was perhaps why he was named Apollo, for the Island had been known by Homer as a sanctuary of Apollo.
It had once been a Dionysian isle of vineyards, beaches, and—surely—beautiful women. Since Greece ceded the Isle to Turkey in 1923, it has been systematically cleansed of Greeks. Though technically a treaty violation, the cleansing was in strict accordance with the times. Turkey expelled Greeks. Greece expelled Turks. All in the name of national unity.
The decades following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and those particularly after the Istanbul Pogrom in 1955, were times of Greek diaspora from ancestral lands they had inhabited since before the Turkish invasions. Soon after Cynthia learned to walk, her guardians vanished suddenly and she was given over to the care of the Church. As she was learning to speak smatterings of Greek and Turkish, she changed hands once more. She found herself on an airliner with a strange man and woman. During the long journey, she woke several times, each time having to readjust to the strange surroundings, which would sometimes change utterly. She would find herself in a small seating space, in a corridor, in a large space of loud, echoing voices. She woke as she was being carried through the night. The adults spoke to her in affectionate voices, but often spoke anxiously and hurriedly. They took her to a house unlike any she had ever seen, where there was another adult, a boy, and an orange dog. The boy was bigger than her, but not much. He showed her a toy train, several cars, and then brought her a stuffed bunny. One of the adults approached and said something to her, but she could not understand anything that was said.
@ 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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03.30.08
Posted in Igneous Range at 8:10 pm by Dan Jensen
Soon after the Mission came to California, Judge Adroushan went up to San Rafael to train with a new guide dog. He returned with a 17 month-old golden retriever named Kale, a wholesome name that the gastronomist found suiting. Though Kale would be a servant to the Mission, the Mission did not distinguish between blood relations and other parishioners, so it was that in his adolescence Kale gained full Missionary status, which meant that to the Mission children he was like a brother with a few incidental chores to perform. He always loved to play catch, or go exploring, and he would not complain if a child abruptly snuggled up to him during one of his many naps.
Kale was a peace-loving parishioner. He avoided cats, escaping their conniving company with his nose and tail down as if they were apt to do him harm, or worse, emit a loud noise. He did not like loud noises. Thunderstorms would compel him to run off into some dark corner of the house and release his bowels. Fireworks would do the same. He even seemed startled by the sound of his own voice. He could seldom be teased to the point of letting a single bark out, whereupon Kale would freeze and look right and left for the source of the sound, as though he were wondering if there was a dog in the vicinity.
All that said, Kale was not a jittery fellow. He would never bite, or even snap his jaws. If he needed your attention, he’d lay his snout on your knee, or if the situation was more urgent, he could ever-so-gently grasp your arm with his jaw. He was—in the absence of gunfire, fireworks, or thunder—wholly reliable, though you wouldn’t want to leave the back gate open, because he would slip out as predictably as air from an untied balloon, and proceed to wander every bit as randomly as molecules once liberated. He would inevitably be discovered surrounded by admirers. He was a charmer.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Igneous Range, Dixie at 7:17 pm by Dan Jensen
As soon as the Adroushans arrived in the Frogmore, the Judge leased some office space in nearby Beaufort, where he planned to start a new legal practice. Mrs. Adroushan spearheaded their arrival with a strong dose of Armenian hospitality. The second day after they arrived, the family went shopping at a grocery store on Lady’s Island and then one in Beaufort, and set out to make their first batch of Frogmore stew, and then invited their new neighbors to share in the task of devouring the newcomers’ concoction. The Adroushans apologized repeatedly for their feeble attempt at the dish, but their apologies were repeatedly rebuffed with appreciation.
The Judge’s career prospects were not what they had previously been in California, but Beaufort was not an entirely forbidding environment for an out-of-town lawyer. The town enjoyed a touch of the coastal cosmopolitanism so notably lacking through much of the deep South. Mr. and Mrs. Adroushan strove to break the ice by first dedicating the office to hospitality, inviting various business leaders in for light meals and light conversation. The blindfold was certainly a strike against him, but suspicions were dispatched quickly with some well-placed humor and a scrapbook of their life in California, featuring newspaper clippings covering his career.
The Adroushans hadn’t been in Frogmore for more than a couple weeks when they were referred to the local physician, a practitioner of chiropractic, Gullah magic, applied kinesiology, herbology, and charisma. When the village doc heard of the passion the Judge engendered for Frogmore stew, he pulled the judge aside and advised that the stew was most efficacious when the soul was fully prepared and conditioned to receive the dish. From that point, the Doc and the Judge spent hours together, often in Beaufort at the office. Before long, the Judge was inviting his guests to partake in the varied therapies prescribed by the Doc.
Rather than a dispenser of justice, the Judge began to see himself as a spiritual healer, but he retained his judicial title. “Health,” he’d remark, “is just a form of justice.” He would use applied kinesiology—alias “muscle testing”—to test specific foods against a particular person. He would use magnetic therapy to balance the body’s digestive energy fields. He would use chiropractic to remove physiological impediments to digestion. He would use nutritional supplements, but not to fill physiological needs, for his concern as a gastronomist was primarily with the spirit. Physiological health was secondary. It could only come, the judge preached, from spiritual health, and was really only a component of spiritual health. With this mission, he was, like any good faith healer, able to draw in both the spiritually and physically ill, so he could be described as a restaurateur, a doctor and a priest. His embraced his new mission with a passion that ensured eventual success, but the young enterprise didn’t quite pay the bills in Beaufort, so the Mission had to migrate to greener pastures.
A century before, Laura Towne and Ellen Murray dedicated their adult lives serving the islanders—a combined 85 years. The judge couldn’t hold on quite that long, and returned to California within a year, but the Mission would continue, and it would return to South Carolina several years later. He would vacillate over the years between the dynamic, vibrant spirit of California cuisine and the well-established spiritual benefits of soul food. As he bounced between coasts, his experience and horizons expanded, and the word “mission” grew more and more synonymous with words like “family” and “home”.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Igneous Range at 3:44 pm by Dan Jensen
After fire, the dog was the first companion to man. Unlike fire, though, man did more than tame the dog; he invented the dog. Recent formal experiments have demonstrated that dogs can read human gestures in a way that their cousins—wolves—simply cannot. How is it that dogs seem to understand us so well? It seems likely that this talent is simply the result of thousands of years of behavior modification through breeding, and that dogs are not as perceptive or compassionate as they sometimes seem.
On the other hand, who is to say that some perceptiveness has not been engineered into dogs with all this behavioral programming? If a species can be engineered to respond to human gestures, is it not being engineered to perceive human gestures at the same time? And what a creature can perceive, it can also feel. We, for instance, may be slaves to our behavior, but even if that is true, we are passionately engaged in that behavior. Are dogs so different from us that we imagine that they cannot feel what they perceive?
This is not to suggest that this perceptiveness is due to a human-like intelligence, or that we can ever understand or appreciate the feelings of another species, but we ought not suppose that no feelings are there.
The dog might be seen as a genetically-engineered mirror, tuned to reflect feelings that we are generally oblivious to. In this sense, we may have much to learn from the dog.
Can one imagine a more impressive technology?
Still, it’s difficult to think of a dog as utterly unconscious. It seems that there must be more to a creature that seems so capable of reading our minds.
In some cultures, the dog is elevated to a nearly human status. Traditional Zoroastrians appears to recognize the dog as a human species, and give the dog a unique place in their burial rituals.
Remarkably, not all peoples share in this ancient partnership. Take for example the western neighbors of the Persians—the Arabs. I remember hearing from my Arabic language teacher that one of the worst insults in Arabic is kalb, which means dog. I suppose that wasn’t much of a surprise, but I was surprised to find that most Muslims regard the dog as ritually unclean, even a demonic creature. Occasionally one will hear a story of a Muslim cab driver who refuses to permit dogs—even seeing-eye dogs—into his car.
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be a Persian Muslim. It seems in so many respects to be a contradictory existence. Does a Persian Muslim love dogs, wine, and song, or does he detest these things?
Say what you will about martyrdom, compensation, idolatry, and predestination in Islam. Muhammad really slipped when he failed to endorse the bond between man and dog. Muslims may suppose that this is due to the alien nature of the dog, but I suspect the opposite. There is a threatening aspect to the familiarity between man and dog, just as with the familiarity between men.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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03.18.08
Posted in Igneous Range, seeker at 8:09 pm by Dan Jensen
Mehrzad was raised in a religious household. His family was Iranian and Muslim, though his parents were not Shi’a or even Sunni. They didn’t mind being the only Muslims in Laketown, as they were not suited to the specific practices of most Muslims, a fact that would inevitably produce friction in a Muslim community.
Mehrzad played violin. As a boy, he did this as a matter of obedience to his parents and as a religious obligation, for music was the only form of prayer practiced in the Kariyani household.
Mehrzad’s parents were radical Islamists, but not the kind of inflammatory stereotype that the appellation Islamist is likely to conjure up. The Kariyani sect is fundamentalist with a single fundamental: monotheism. For him, “one God” meant that no one man or ideal can represent God. Even Muhammad, for him, could only have been a man of his time and place, and the Qur’an was no more than a book of its time and place. Still, both Muhammad and the Qur’an meant a great deal to Dr. Kariyani as a Muslim, even though he would call other Muslims “idolators” for making the Prophet and the Qur’an “partners with God”. Though for most Muslims an absolute, unwavering belief in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet is the foundation of their faith, Dr. Kariyani would often assert that “belief is just a pretty name for idolatry“.
So it was that the Kariyani boys, as good Muslims, would perform their prayers five times daily. Each boy would pick up his instrument, face their Qiblah, and reverently perform his scales or a song. For most Muslims, facing the Qiblah means turning toward the Ka’aba, a pre-Islamic stone idol in Mecca. The Kariyanis did not do this, for obvious reasons. Instead, they faced the sun, which meant that they would face a different direction each time. In the morning, they would face the East. In the evening, they would face the West. At noon, they would turn opposite the shadows on the ground outdoors. When praying during moonlit nights, they would face the moon. “We face the light,” Mr. and Mrs. Kariyani would often say. They did this as Iranian Muslims, knowing that their ancestors turned toward fires and other light sources during prayer. The Iranians had prayed five times daily long before Muhammad, and their prayers were songs.
“Words are inadequate for prayer,” the elder Kariyanis would occasionally insist, though Mrs. Kariyani would still chant the orthodox Islamic prayers of her childhood. She would defend her action by pointing out that she did not speak Arabic or understand the words. She insisted that it was the chanting and the sound of the words that aroused the spirit; not the meaning of the words.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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03.02.08
Posted in Igneous Range at 2:30 pm by Dan Jensen
When Armen was just learning to walk, his father Judge Adroushan had his epiphany.
The Judge might not have seemed ripe for change, as he had developed quite a career in law as a judge in his hometown of Fresno. He was not only the only Armenian judge on the County Superior Court, but he was also the only blind member of the court as well. Many thought that he made a bit too much of the circumstance, going so far as to wear a white blindfold, not only at court, but reportedly at all times. It certainly made for good stage, particularly in the justice system, but he played down the drama with statements like “some men wear sunglasses; some wear eye patches. I’m more comfortable with this.”
He would occasionally say that he resolved many years ago to wear his blindness with the dignity of choice rather than the shame of circumstance. He was not a victim of anything. A judge determines as much from the tone of a person’s voice as the look on their face, but as to the latter: he had his spies. A well-trained blind ear can pick up nuances that the most perceptive dramatist might miss.
“The job of a judge is to listen,” he would say, and he’d occasionally add, “the human race is not set apart by its powers of vision.”
The attorneys were not oblivious to his perceptiveness, and generally felt themselves at an unfair disadvantage. To many, dealing with a blind man was something like dealing with a faceless man. Though those that had some experience with the judge felt they had a leg up on the competition, none of them felt that they could ever sustain any sense of control of the momentum of a trial.
It happened one sultry evening at a new Cajun restaurant in Fresno. The special that night was Frogmore stew, a spicy concoction of leftovers along the lines of paella, goulash, and pizza, featuring shrimp, crab, potatoes, sausage, and corn cobs. The dish struck the judge somewhere deep down, and it would later become obvious that he would never be the same. The Adroushan family began eating at the new restaurant regularly—as often as the judge could manage without embarrassment. One night he could no longer resist asking the waiter about the history of the dish. He sensed a soul in the dish that he felt compelled to get to know intimately. A dish is, to some extent, an extension of a people. The judge had a sense that this was particularly true for Frogmore stew, and there was something about the soul of this dish that spoke to him.
“No frogs?,” inquired the Judge.
“Frogs, sir?”
“In the stew.”
“Oh, no sir.”
Mrs. Adroushan let out a sigh.
“Then why the name?”, continued the judge.
The waiter could not provide an immediate answer, but after consulting with the chef, he returned to the Adroushan table to explain that the dish originated with a fishing village by the same name in South Carolina.
The town is no longer on the map—not, by that name anyway, for the demands of the tourist trade eventually forced the village to be renamed to Saint Helena, after the Island on which it is situated.
Judge Adroushan quickly developed a sense of remote commonality with the people of Frogmore from that stew. It was as if they were kindred spirits; as though he had lived a previous life there. The town gave his life a new sense of direction; a kind of mission. This was quite in the spirit of the village itself, as it had a missionary history. It was the place where Laura Matilda Towne and Ellen Murray moved to serve the population of freed slaves and establish the Penn School in 1862.
By the time the Adroushans arrived in Frogmore, over a century after Penn School was founded, not much had changed. Frogmore remained to all appearances a largely autonomous colony of freed slaves. Some things had changed. There were of course the modern conveniences like plumbing, though such modern conveniences were largely dysfunctional. The boxer Joe Frazier, himself a native of nearby Beaufort, was reported to have called Frogmore the slum of the South.
It may be rightly said that Frogmore was also the Geneva of the South in 1966. It was in Frogmore, at Penn Center, that Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, Jessie Jackson, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference met every year. Locals, including the judge and his family, were invited to attend the November 1966 conference, during which much debate took place regarding the pros and cons of nonviolent activism. It was at this conference that King expanded his vision from civil rights to human rights. Frogmore was at once nowhere and the place to be, but that was neither here not there to the Judge.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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02.11.08
Posted in Igneous Range at 10:19 pm by Dan Jensen
The scent of rotting meat accented the aroma of honey suckle. An open jar of hamburger sat slowly browning in the Valley heat.
The tilting wingspans of the three vultures cycled ‘round like the blades of a ceiling fan against a high, blue ceiling. Around and around, as though they were chained together like ponies at the county fair.
Her skin, anointed with meat, glistened in the sun where it wasn’t shaded by the deer skin.
Cindy lay atop the flat roof, enclosed by its 18-inch perimeter wall, with her right hand shading her eyes, still as possible, hoping to use her body as a lure, hoping to bring the great scavengers in a little lower. She grew drowsy in the warm sun, and let her mind drift off to sleep.
As she slipped under the conscious surface, he appeared to her once again, soaring twenty feet or so above her in the swimming subconscious air, breaking the rays of the sun with mighty wings as he drifted left and right on the heavy air.
She was jolting into consciousness as her sleeping body tipped slightly, and she woke to a wild flapping of wings, ten or twenty feet overhead, as the startled vultures strove to escape the sudden resurrection. In a moment, the sky was empty and silent. A moment later, Cindy pulled her clothes on, grabbed her bow and quiver, clambered over the perimeter wall, and eased herself down until her feet touched the top of the fence.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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Posted in Igneous Range at 9:13 pm by Dan Jensen
The scrolling text on the TV screen announced yet another closure for their school.
After breakfast, Cindy returned to her room and grabbed her bow and quiver. She waded quickly through the fog to the back lot, and stepped and stumbled across the lumps and furrows of the recently ploughed soil. Once she’d arrived at the far back of the lot, she turned to face the fence that enclosed the family lot. She couldn’t see the fence, but she had seen enough of it to know it was there, and she knew exactly where ‘there’ was. She began pulling arrows from her quiver, setting them, and releasing them into the fog, one after another in rhythmic succession. Knowing how many arrows she had, she never reached back into an empty quiver, but began across the fog to a veiled plywood target board. She heard her brother shout “coming through!” for his own safety as he cut blindly across the lot. Collecting her arrows, she turned back into the fog to repeat her assault on the dissolving board, over and over, as the fog began to burn off, and the target emerged from the milky veil. Armen would, without fail, return home from lake football before she ever completed the bombardment.
One sunny February day, more than a week after the last recent rain, the fog had thinned out and burned off. Armen and Cindy walked home from school. The walked together more circumstantially than intentionally. One would often lag behind the other. One might have more urgent business at home than the other. Chances were they’d both need to relieve their bladders after school. It was easier to withstand the torments of the bladder than the teasing in the restrooms. This day, Cindy took the lead.
He saw several turkey vultures soaring high above their neighborhood. Maybe something had been hit. Maybe something had died, and had been thrown out onto one of the vacant lots.
The thought occurred to Armen that Cindy either had to pee or she was in a hurry to get back to her archery. It wasn’t more than a passing thought. He was more interested in the vultures.
He didn’t see Cindy when he got home, but he thought nothing of it. He was not accustomed to keeping an eye on her, as much time as she spent on the back lot. She would be back for dinner as ever before.
One day not long after, Armen went to play some post-season football in the field beyond the lot. Cindy was not there. He thought that she must be in here room. She didn’t really have any friends to go visit after school, or did she?
Again, she was back in time for dinner.
Armen would find himself checking for her more often. Most days he would find her with her bow on the back lot, but some days he would not; then one day he decided he’d tail her. He covertly tailed her right to their back door, followed her into the house, and watched her leave with her bow and quiver. He continued to tail her when her could, and it seemed that she always did the same thing. He determined that she must be taking her bow and quiver elsewhere, so he began to tail her from the house. He found her heading straight to the lot, day after day. Finally, one day in April, she altered her routine. She stopped outside the back porch and looked up into the sky. Armen couldn’t see what she was looking at from inside. As soon as she continued walking, he slipped out the back door. He crept quietly toward the back fence. As he got past the garage, he heard a creaking sound behind the garage. As he peeked around the ivy barrier, he spied his sister standing atop the six-foot wood fence, and from thence lifting herself up onto the flat roof of the garage. “Yreka!”, he whispered, but he found himself uncertain as to what he ought to do. After a moment’s silent deliberation, he chose to leave her be for the time being. It had suddenly occurred to him that such a private place was just right for his little sister. Knowing she was there was all that he really needed. He turned and walked back to the house.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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01.24.08
Posted in Igneous Range at 6:05 pm by Dan Jensen
His body was scarred red with severe burns. A tangle of short black hairs carpeted his brow. His scarred scalp was bald, except for the occasional stray hair. Between his small but piercing eyes protruded a hard, hooked beak. His eyes were not blue, green, or brown, but an orange-red, like his skin, but brighter—luminescent, as though flames might be harbored within. He had no lips. His long neck was wrapped in a furry, black scarf. Most of his scarred body was wrapped in a cloak of black feathers, with two rows of white feathers on the inside. The cloak looked as though it might have once been white, but charred black in a fire.
He opened his cloak, and it spread nine feet wide against the sky as he soared above her. He hovered overhead, watching Cynthia, as if waiting for her. She could not speak or even cry out. She lay paralyzed, trembling. “Cindy?,” she heard a familiar voice, then something began to shake her. “Cindy! You’re dreaming,” said her brother as she opened her eyes to see a less frightening countenance over her. “You’re sweating,” Armen whispered. “Breakfast is ready.”
Cynthia turned to see the wall of whiteness outside her bedroom window. Her black, curly hair sprang into place as she sat up. She bent down, lifted her robe off the floor, and slid it over her shoulders. She wiped the cold sweat off her face with the collar.
Four bowls of cornmeal sat evenly spaced around the small round table like compass points. Facing the bowls were her brother and parents. She seated herself and her father began a prayer of thanks. She watched his eyebrow and hard, reddened, balding forehead as he thanked the Father for all His blessings. His eyeless lids were collapsed into his sockets. He had not yet put his glass eyes in for the day. The redness of the empty caverns crept out between his eyelashes. She had seen him countless times before, but this morning she saw her father a little differently, and she sat semiconsciously puzzled, not quite aware that the prayer had ended.
After a momentary pause, spoons began to clank on bowls. Cindy snapped out of the trance and stirred the molasses and half-molten butter into the steaming meal.
© 2008 Dan J. Jensen
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