Gateway - Ice Girl
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Banlung is a gateway to isolated animist villages up river.
The Tonle Srepok River is the heart of darkness. The Apocalypse Now River.
The river overflowed with tedious years of silence singing a slow meandering song before being punctuated by random acts of violence, gunfire and exploding land mines swallowing eternal cries for mercy as innocent men, women and children were slaughtered in fields, homes, and villages along twisted dirt jungle paths or murdered inside animist cemeteries wearing crude carved wooden faces remembering the dead with ceremonies, laughter, animal sacrifice and rice wine hearing the low dull roar of high altitude bombers releasing enraptured napalm canister lightning bolts through clear skies rendering humans, mountains and jungles obsolete accompanied by the steady rhythm of a girl sawing ice.
Someone said there was a war, said Ice Girl. Mother saw a whirling bird, called a helicopter. She wove it with our traditional motifs of weavers, people carrying water, harvesting, dancing, playing music, sitting, resting, flowers, fields, cows, chickens, ducks, birds, banana and palm trees, rivers, sky and nature. She weaves our long story. Before writing after cutting and selling ice I weave.
Animist people believe in the natural world. Every living thing has spirit energy.
A shy woman shaman performed a family ceremony and healing sacrifice.
She smeared chicken blood over a sick infant’s stomach. Villagers are superstitious and trusting.
Bored dead eyed humans wandered red dust.
One prolific business in Banlung was mechanical. Along and adjacent to the single east west paved artery were brown wooden homes and shacks of rusting corrugated tin.
Single men or teams of laborious boys hammered, welded, pried, manipulating iron and steel, adjusting belts, guided grinding gears, solidifying particles, firing cylinders, filing metallic blisters, reworking tired 125cc engines and formatting hard drives as spokes on crude machines sang.
Repair and restoration work implied basic life skills using eye-hand coordination, communication theory modules with colleagues, decipherable brooms, grease, balloons, laughter and a high degree of universal understanding and empathy.
Freedom worked 24/7. Under a broiling sun tempered by a soft breeze they carried buckets of cement over boards, pouring it on red dirt. Freedom shoveled 21 muscular sandy efforts into a wheelbarrow. Freedom pushed it to a new world order construction site filled with profound expectations and poverty’s paradoxes.
After dark Freedom caressed a hungry $10 passive lover inside a plywood shack along a dirt road removed from neon, Zircon and the tooth fairy. Dirt floor, bed, OK condom.
Her clothes hung on rusty nails embedded in exploitation. Stale perfume, lip-gloss and mascara sang lost memories. Her dead eyes said, plow my field with no emotional connection. She stared at a brick wall as Freedom assaulted heaven’s gate grinding desire.
After fifteen minutes longer than forever she joined five girlfriends sitting around a fire below stars. See who shows up, said one, the night’s young. We are tools, said another. I don’t give a shit, said a sad one remembering her mother and siblings upriver.
The fat male moneyman slouched in a porch hammock watched reality reruns under a red light special.
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