Draw The Dead

The Maija artist in Fujian, China accepted a photo from a grieving relative, set up his easel and studied a face with a magnifying glass.

His pencil sketched an 8x10. On chipped plaster walls were images of farmers, aunts, uncles, husbands, wives, young and old Pioneer Communist members with tight red party issued scarves knotting necks suffocating passion.

This day he sketched a stoic resigned peasant woman. She’d suffered at the hands of the Nationalists then Communists then corrupt greedy economic free market revolutionaries before facing the indignities of old age.

Old age is a killer.

A battered three-string wooden musical instrument hung near red streaks of paint in his fine art museum. A black fly on the artist’s left shoulder rubbed feelers together. Tasty.

An emaciated smiling ascetic friend of the artist wearing a skeleton face with paper-thin arms opened a bag of Fujian tea. He poured tight compressed leaves into his bony right hand dispersing it into an old chipped blue pot. He added water from a battered red thermos. We shared tea watching the artist. The likeness was perfect. The tea tasted acidic.

These images decorated Asian family altars and collected dust in temples. Ancestor worship and the fear of ghosts is a big deal.

Do all the ancestors hear, understand and acknowledge the yelling? Yes. Do they open their mouths requesting a little peace and quiet? Yes.

On anniversary death days they meet ghost ancestors in cement alley mazes where piss, drain water, used cooking oil, daily slop and vicarious liquids flowed into small holes.

The dead formed a rubber stamp committee addressing Asian family noise.

“It’s come to our attention dear comrades, beloved family and friends...we have a communication volume problem in the neighborhood. Silence. We are trying to enjoy a long peaceful restful sleep. Leave us be or we will return to haunt you. Forever.”

The Language Company

El Carnicero

Big black hungry Spanish flies buzzed and fought around fresh red meat dripping warm blood into dust dancing along the devil’s whiplash.

A mangy cur dog rolled over in shade, ribs scraping grounded dust, begging for water.

A drop in the ocean, where it’s all H2O no matter how deep you dive. Waves washed shores singing stones.

Sausages retained a sharpness inextricably swaying like dancers in choreography. Tired, frayed strings bent under dead meat weight mass, substance, context.

Remembering the Spanish Civil War, Manuel the butcher stared through a jagged broken glass window. His facemask spoke a weary solemn stillness quiet lying fury.

His silent words were exaltations, evaluations, a surcharge, a value added tax in an empty stomach for services rendered by reinforcements riding hard through Basque valleys listening for waves of German bombers over Guernica 1936.

Beleaguered men inside stone shepherd huts trapped in desolate Pyrenees mountains stood spinning, surrounded by empty canteens, bread crusts, discarded family heirlooms, spent shell casings, and decomposing bodies relishing solitude.

He’s required to remember old Fascist propaganda spreading information.

He is El Carnicero, one who slaughters.

In order to put food on the table and provide for his family after peace was declared with celebrations of music, church services, baptisms, wine, street dancing and tear streaked burials, economics forced him to slaughter his remaining beast of burden.

His bull was his calling card, vision, hope, dream and village identity. Dictators, thieves and Fascists had stolen everything else. Dignity, integrity and self-respect survived.

Destiny arrived minus sympathy, sentiment or condolences. Shaded from a brutal sun he sharpened his axe, honing steel across a grindstone. New edges were sharpened with passionate ambivalence.

Laughter’s axe was ready.

He walked into a red clay ring surrounded by a white clapboard fence. The bull stood in the far corner.

He held out his hands lined with pulse-rivers. The bull emerged from shade. Manuel collected reins. In the animal’s eyes he saw memory reflected in his soul. Sighing, he clapped his hands twice, bowing to the bull as a Shinto priest pays his respects to Bishamonten, the Kami god of benevolent authority.

He asked for forgiveness, this act of fate, raised his laughing axe and brought it down hard and fast on the bull’s neck. The bull froze, slumping, straining to escape steel carving tough weathered skin, muscles, tendons, sinew, arteries, veins, snapping final bones.

Front legs folded, rear legs buckled. The carcass shuddered. A final breath exploded red dust.

He clapped his hands, severed the head and dragged everything through dust to his shop. He hung the severed head in his broken window.

“For Sale.”

His wife served portions to family and neighbors. They consumed his life’s work, toasting his wise sacrifice for the greater good. Sharing is caring.

I am an accomplice to death. I could have stopped it. No. This is a lie. Truth lies. Truth hides in the mystery of interpretation. I couldn’t prevent death. I tried to speak and save the bull. Words. I was afraid. Language strangled me. My voice was dust. I was five.

He was my father.

Which is greater, real pain or pain’s premonition I wondered as Manuel’s silver blade melted reflections into diamonds of glittering light. The quick and dead burned. Manual and death danced inside my childhood, inside time’s compressed memory where rivers of stained glass mosaic memory melted. I took ownership of laughter’s axe.

Mirror reflections retained red river blood and sweat dancing on Manuel’s temple. Blood and sweat congealed in red dust creating tributaries and oceans in Spanish heat one swift irrevocable summer.

The world is a strong sense of Guerencia, a Spanish term for homeland, “a place, like a bull facing death in the ring, where you feel comfortable dying.”

Surviving along the Mediterranean meant controlling trade routes in slaves, salt, textiles, gold, silver, copper, limestone, turquoise, red granite, alabaster, bananas, sugar cane, cotton, sorghum, ivory, timber and purple dye.

Land and sea trade routes flowed with cuneiform, hieroglyphics, Phoenician alphabets, Mandarin, Meso-American, Runic and Indus script, coins, wooden tally sticks recording the number of animals killed, religions, amber, animals, royal purple clothing, grains, horses, incense, olive oil, silk, spices, tin, wine, tortoise shells and slaves.

Commodities.

Witnessing everything from a small Spanish village at the edge of the sea I seized cold-blooded mercenary opportunities. I evolved through determination, persistence and perseverance. Trial and error danced with cause and effect hearing The Art Of The Fugue by Bach.

Thin calm detached hungry dancing spirit fingers hummed down a necklace of threaded skeleton bone beads of catastrophic karmic actions near contemplative Gomchen mystic Tantric hermits north of Sera monastery in Tibet. Monks sat chanting and praying in sight of Chomolungma, the Mother Goddess.

Butchers, the untouchables, flayed corpses before smashing bones for vultures to reincarnate a spirit in a sky burial.

Frozen earth informed archeologists there would be no work here with their soft brushes.

I absorbed Tibetan dialects by swallowing bone dust. Transmissions of spirit energies, renewal and transformation evolved with joy, beauty and gratitude.

I sat meditating, breathing, digging, absorbing creation stories, illusions between what was and what is.

Realizing amazing journeys I discovered childlike laughter, curiosity and joy.

You are either innocent or mad.

Flip a coin. Magic nature opened my third eye to see what will be. Mirrors are free of dust and illusions. I dissolved.

The day after tomorrow belongs to me.

The Gomchen taught me how to meditate on the process of death. It centers a person fast. First thing in the morning, shapes my motivation with clarity.

“What is the motivation behind my desire to acquire _______ and the things that come with it?”

Motivation and its effects were determined by reading The Roots of Wisdom by Ming.

Mountains and rivers and earth are already nothing but dust.

Man, of course, is but dust within dust.

Bodies made of blood and muscle will surely return to bubble and shadows.

If the highest wisdom is not obtained, there will be no heart of understanding.

All is vanity.

One ought to live a life of peace and quietude.

What’s the point of unrelenting pursuit of external things?

El Carnicero, archeologists and I cherish our illuminated rolling stoned spirit energies.

Our choice is simple.

Sit or move. 

Weaving A Life (V1)

Literary Agent Orange - Ice Girl

Chapter 24.

On Khmer New Year’s Day a bitter mother at a Kampot guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.          

  “Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

  She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

  She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Rita, the Ice Girl.

  Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

  It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating twenty years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

  Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

  Beauty is the mother of Death.

  Leo and Ice Girl turned their morning pages away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

  They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

  They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always observing minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

  Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers do: close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual sensory information, data, sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient. Watching without seeing is their Zen.

  Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and talking louder.

  Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

  One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear. Fear is disguised as indecision and loss.

  What is the difference between watching and seeing, asked Ice Girl, expanding passive and active verb signifiers.

  Real eyes realize real lies, said Leo.

  Survivors read the sky for rain. Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in the middle of empty black streets without electricity.

  Screaming, yelling male adolescents and old survivors read kick boxers fighting each other on national television every Saturday/Sunday afternoon at 2. It’s standing room only.

KILL HIM!

KILL HIM!

KILL HIM!

  Killing as Entertainment. I love this, said Death. They are really into it. Power. Reminds me of millions shouting their anger at killing fields.

  Violence never changes, only the players, said Leo.

  It’s their latent repressed anger gene, said Ice Girl. Denial will kill you and anger is expensive.

  Women meditate.

  Boy men scream at televisions.

  Survivors Waiting For Godot squeezing pores read a face in a motorbike mirror. They haven’t seen the play. They are the players.

  No one shows up, nothing happens.

  Hungry girls wait for Freedom at night.

  Destiny rested as noon heat reflected improbable anxieties. A bored working girl washed her blue underwear in a lazy brown river. Water’s exhilaration introduced her to a cloud. Thunder clapped. White lighting flashed. Tears flooded a red road.

 Children wearing red and white Santa caps dragged expectant Banlung mothers toward dusty chrome plated market display cases.

  This one! This one!

  In primary schools Khmer children learn a story about survival skills, said Ice Girl.

  Once upon a time there was a hungry rabbit.

  It saw a woman coming with a basket of vegetables on her head.

  The rabbit thought, I will play dead and see what happens.

  The woman stopped when she saw the rabbit.

  She said, “A dead rabbit. Meat. We will eat good tonight.”

  She picked up the rabbit, put it her basket and continued walking.

  The rabbit ate all the vegetables and ran away.

  What a clever rabbit.

  The woman went home. “We are going to eat good tonight,” she said to her family. “I found a rabbit.”

  Everyone was happy. She put down her basket. “O my.”

 I see, said Leo. Will you please share your story about the literary agent?

  Ok, said Ice Girl. The working title is:

Geological Sub-Strata Section

  The protagonist is a literary agent dying of thirst.

  The beginning needs work, said a visually challenged agent at Blind Lead The Blind Agency.

 Ok, said Ice Girl, I’m working on it, thinking, She doesn’t know shit. She wants to make her glorious 15%. Actually I don’t have an agent. I am secret agent B-8. An agent of prescient psychic abilities.

 Not true, said the agent. You make your own truth from embroidered lies. I know everything and can say nothing about beginnings, sustaining a story, plot, narrative flow and full character development. Make me cry. Give me emotional honesty so I feel for the protagonist. Grab me by the throat in the first clear short sentence. Make me pay attention.

Give me a sharp emotional marketing hook hanging above a marketing platform in sleazy cheap plywood Asian brothel where evil greedy men and women controllers threaten and violently abuse orphaned sex slave girls. Where they buy them or steal them from poor families in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, use them, abuse them and discard them. On the mean old street.

  They are a commodity like rice.

  Rich men buy virgins for $5,000 a pop. Open my legs. Plow the fertile soil between my legs. Open my feeble, nonchalant and passive innocent broken heart-mind. Throw in some Asian culture like wailing Chinese opera, ballet, The Art of the Fugue by Bach and weeping Apsara dancers on laterite Angkor ruins from the 8th century. Show me how superstitious men believe fucking a virgin gives them super strength enabling them to leap over tall virgins with a single organismic shudder. Give me a small organic boom-boom death in eight seconds.

 Ice Girl listened. The agent droned on. She was a Predator drone at 18,000 feet or a GRIM REAPER at 17,500 feet zeroing in for the kill sale.

 Unemployed internally displaced literary agents reading manuscripts huddled around a fire in a cave filled with 26,000 year-old Paleolithic paintings. They witnessed bison, deer, archers, and time-combs. Slashing red and black fish were trapped in black cages. Fingerprints whorled hunting stories.

  Big mama agent said: I need to feel the female pain, their sense of hopelessness, their loss of being abandoned for eternity. Through their painful memory fear and sheer terror I need to feel comprehend and identify with their anguish inside vulnerable skin. Dig into their skin, their brain, and their heart. Show me terrible, tragic and flawed the lost road of innocence by the Cambodian con artist. She had good intentions.

  Through their desperation with poor economic fate, choices, intention, karma, motivation, growth and action allow them to develop courage and truth. Their arc shows how they adapt, adjust and evolve in a Darwinian sense to a higher form of consciousness.

 Mindfulness free of fear, anger and ego.

Their quest for personal empowerment, self-esteem, dignity and freedom from tyranny, exploitation and slavery will appeal to readers. Awareness of the human condition. Volunteered salivating slavery. Get it in writing, ha, ha, ha.

 She reiterated required mainstream literary criteria for Ice Girl. Show how they support each other in their collective communal misery sharing tissues. Show how they maintain a strong sense of self-esteem and personal identity after being abandoned, battered, raped, whipped, starved, screwed and chained in cold rooms for five years to break their spirit. It’s called seasoning. If you want to train a wild animal you need to break their spirit.

 Sounds like a global educational conspiracy to beat, de-story, traumatize and obliterate any and all creative spirit out of children for twelve deadly years. Dead before adulthood, thought Ice Girl.

 Call the gravedigger. He's never out of work.

  Agent diatribe: Structure the tedious narrative from A to Z engaging my senses in their broken, shattered narratives illustrating truth, pain and anguish, sorrow, showing how love, fate, and chance manifests through silence, cunning and exile with passion and dire consequences leading to redemption and a happy, sad or what have you end. Give me the drama.

Give me the living dead girls, the VICTIMS in life’s cruel unrelenting heart breaking drama, with dead eyes lying flat on their back their legs wide open staring at plywood walls filled with torn glossy images of smiling feminine coiffured hair salon advertising myths as strange wild men fuck them 24/7 crushing their emotional life. Structure their tragic consequences trusting a manipulative greedy mama-san running the business under the protection and tacit consent of local police. She gives the police a free fucking discount or goes to jail. Yes, create a colorful mind map of their personal and collective journey. Show me. Don’t tell me about their tragic love and tragic passion and tragic suffering. Make sadistic things happen to them. Rip my heart out. Build the tension with cinematic pace. Then, in a dramatic climax en masse they escape the clutches of the evil manipulators. In the falling action they join a safe community women’s shelter based on healing, recovery, regaining personal strength, dignity, self-respect, empowerment.

  They learn new job skills like cutting and selling ice.

  They learn how to weave. They discover their life needle leads a story thread. They take control of their life.

 They form love killer groups and hunt down men and women who betrayed them. The women kill them with love and compassion. The denouement is their brutal REVENGE. Best served cold. Calm, detached and honest.

  BUT, said agent alliterated, I’m pretty. I’m pretty busy reading obscure vague query letters and synopses filled with vowels, consonants, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, tough love, mysteries and dime store romance, not to mention salacious graphic comics. Get to the verb. Get to the action. Establish a scene. Paint a voice. Develop characters, narrative, structure, plot, thematic unity, setting and multiple marketing platforms from recycled manuscripts. Pulp. Keep me turning the page. Make the characters want something, even if it’s a drink of water in the middle of the Gobi. Everyone needs water. Leo can tell you about the value of water in the Gobi.

 Ice girl asked: You mean it’s like standing on a dark edge staring into an abyss called civilization with a courageous noble savage cannibal king named Leo wearing an alarm clock around his neck committing sewer side with absolute free will above shimmering blue pools of incandescent liquid molecular frozen particles with brave stone cold clarity immobilized at heights of illusionary immaculate freedom seeing their immortality, their deepest fear in ROOM 101, alongside brave OTHERS unflinching in their love, compassion and goodness, this infinite potential? Where all points end at infinity? Where eternity plays with time? Before jumping over the abyss Leo yells, People think art is easy! Just tell them it’s like jumping off a 12 story building every day. JUMP!

 Yes, said the agent. It has to be heart breaking. You develop your wings after jumping.

  You don’t know the meaning of heartbreak said Ice Girl. I’ve buried more people than you’ve published. Once I witnessed an old man wearing a rainbow knit cap write Eternity on a paper napkin in Planet Paradise, a coffee joint in Eugene, Oregon. He torched Eternity with a match. His tired traveling blazing eyes watched Eternity burn to a cinder. Black and white eternal ash and dust fluttered from his fingers. He mumbled incoherent incantations about fate’s joke, meaningless life, existential choices, irony and consequences.

  Something like that, said the agent with ineptness. Life is a chess game of experiences we get to play.

 The burning seer found his inner light, said Ice Girl. He walked into a world trailing ash, feeling wind in his heart. Sun burned his retinas. Time tides in the long now ebbed and receded where the event horizon blurred his cognitive facilities. He lapsed into a stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence talking to shadows, ghosts and shamans. He approached the point of universal consciousness with mind-at-large where fiction and memory and dream and imagination are the same exact thing. He confronted the endless abyss. He jumped. He saved himself.

 Really, said agent. The publishing world is a crapshoot. A casino. After expanding the narrative working the brothel angle give me mythical evil, cold blooded sadistic mega maniacs, corrupt politicians, civil servants, millions of poorly paid laconic Asian teachers, nurses, doctors and financially motivated international bankers and politicians practicing fraud, sexual harassment and NGO graft under the auspices of organized crime charities.

  Give me gloom and doom global financial collapse with character arc de triumph and a fairy tale happy ending with revolutionary caviar and champagne. Establish a narrative flow line where heroes or heroines conquer their unconscious fears, demons and symbolic metaphorical archetypes.

 Keep it simple. Woman meets man. Woman faces obstacles: ice, money, sex, love, compromising her values, morals, ethics, principles, publishing her story etc.

 Woman loses man. Woman sells more ice, gets more money, fucks man out of loneliness during a 5-year courtship, (he will save me) discovers blind love exchanging one form of volunteered slavery for another. Man promises her BIG money.

She gets engaged accepting with resignation that sex business is money business. She keeps writing. She sends her story out. She becomes an independent author/publisher after multiple orgasms and form rejections from blind agents. The independent woman gets her man. She introduces man to her poor family and 11 siblings. Family demands $5k as a minimum down payment. She is a valuable child bearing resource.

  They give their daughter an engagement t-shirt.

 My body is a work of art. It’s for sale and it ain’t cheap.

 Man facing family greed suffers an internal crisis of fear, uncertainty and doubt. He agrees. He goes to the crossroads at midnight. He sells his soul to the d-evil. If you want to play you have to pay.

  Man pays for family engagement party. Man pays local officials for marriage approval documents. Man pays local shaman for blessing. Man pays for her eleven sibling’s education. They are excited to learn how to read. Man pays for a water pump. Man pays for solar panels. Man pays for her grandparent’s medicine. Man pays for rice seeds, rabbits, vegetables, for eternity.

  Parents give expensive village party impressing everyone how rich and popular they are with gleaming scheming status. Mother coerces daughter to produce many children and propitiate their poverty cycle. Give us someone to love. Someone who will work, breed and get slaughtered. Someone to take care of us. Someone to bury us.

  Feed us incense, said dead relative ghosts.

 Agent: That’s a mouthful of pay. Write about a heroine on a quest. Give me twisted international investment fund managers manipulating Goldilocks, NGOs skimming 70% off the top in Cambodia or Laos with exorbitant administrative costs, an orphan with no motivation but survival, profit and greed and tons of CORPORATE monopoly play money.

Give me heartbreak, emotional tragedy, drastic home foreclosures, forged land ownership papers, jealousy, revenge, pride, and make sure pride is filled with glimmering prominence. It brings people down, crashing empires, resolving conflicts.

Give me disabled unemployed (15%) homeless angry Iraq and Afghanistan USA war veterans and their struggles with PTSS, divorce, authenticity, domestic famine, The System and revenge, a central motivating factor, best served cold. Give me imaginary borders in a crazy fucked up world. Crossing borders is a transcendental act of courage.

 Ascertain the intention before the motivation, said Ice Girl.

  The agent climbed a literary mountain. If there’s no literary mountain, she said, the publishing road would be flat, straight and short.

 Give me a new paragraph with short dirty realism, said lit agent. Give me a classic Greek drama in three acts. Give me romance and treason, deception, intrigue and mayhem. Humans are the only animals that can scheme and deceive.

  Give me short simple sentences.

 Give me a life sentence with no chance for parole. Give me 1.7 million Khmers on death row tormented by ghosts. Give multiple characters fear, forgiveness, shock and awe. Like Orwell give me some unpleasant facts about a condemned man, on his way to the gallows, stepping around a puddle of water. Give me his gesture, his feeling, this quick generous insight into the human condition. Strap me into my literary electric chair living in a kingdom with twenty-four virgins. Virgins strike for equality. Give me a lethal literary injection. Drip by drip. Yes, give me a metaphor of mind numbing, fumbling, bumbling heart drama, intrigue and chaos. Entropy. Find the big metaphor, my dear ice girl.

 Give me REVENGE, served cold, which is how and why war started. The why factor. Give me a dumb downed version of primordial Faust. Give me humans selling their soul or young virgin brothel bodies to the d-evil to achieve their nefarious ends. Give me a heart-wrenching tale of abandonment, loss, misery and redemption. Tie in faint hope, a great EVIL and the last thing that dies with gravity and arc. Allow your characters to explore their feelings, thoughts, reactions and growth with total comprehension and the unpleasant scientific fact that the universe is 3.5 billion years old and approaching TOTAL COMPLEXITY.

 Some refer to TOTAL COMPLEXITY as God. You may want to move this fact to the very brutal yet incomplete satisfying conclusion, said the agent. This means the LONG NOW or 20,000 years of human evolution is speeding up. Period. It’s becoming more random and chaotic. There’s a huge mind-at-large difference between complicated and complex.

 If you can write in God’s voice, it may sell. Many have tried, few are chosen. God has a huge slush pile.

 Earth, this is God. I have someone who’s interested in the property and I want you OUT by the end of the month. How’s that?

 Imagine an accelerated space program as humans escape Earth, said Ice Girl. Only the very rich can afford a shuttle seat. So it goes. Everyone fends for himself or herself. Noble savages are free to do anything, rape, plunder, take a vacation, build an ark, move into abandoned slum mansions, print money, form armies, buy and sell bananas and have unprotected sex with strangers. A doomsday scenario plus or minus friend links, likes, tags, share buttons, categories, electronic social networks and technological wiz gadgets.

  Do not give me punctuation marks like parenthesis, said the agent. They stop me cold.

 Punctuation is a nail.

 Give me thesis, coma and commas. Rational certainty. How about quotation marks, asked Ice Girl. Periodically. Or, just capitalize the first letter when a character speaks. That’ll work. Have you read The Stone Raft, or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, or Blindness, said Ice Girl.

 No, I only read the first five pages of everything that lands on my desk. I’ve got a slush pile higher than Everest. Tons of garbage lies near the summit. Talk about mountains of trash, water bottles, equipment, frozen bodies and rejected manuscripts. Dreams diehard.

  They’re by a Portuguese writer named Jose Saramago, said Ice Girl. He wrote about the human condition. How people feel isolated and struggle with their need for community and individuality. He addresses their need to find meaning and dignity outside political and economic structures.

  Facoinating. That’s all well and good, said agent. Mainstream readers do not want a slow paced, intelligent memoir, novel or non-linear esoteric eclectic threaded saga. They like stories with Swedish journalists, oligarchies, and smart crazy tattooed misfit computer hackers. Remember her t-shirt? The Apocalypse was yesterday. Today we have a problem.

 A reasonable personification of mystery. Add sex by a smart Vietnamese woman. Readers want dreams, fantasy, magical realism, desperate heavy deep real situations, romance and delicious date rape recipes filled with evil hope illustrated by language animals like pigs and talking monkeys living on an Animal Farm in Comabodia.

 Some pigs are more equal than others. Oink.

 How about talking chickens in Cambodia and Vietnam, rendered Ice Girl. Chickens with beautiful faces. Innocent, naive, dirt-poor chickens.

  If you must. Sex sells. Can they read? No. Can they write a synopsis? No. They fuck for a living. Yes, well I sell manuscripts for a living. Same-same but different.

  I prostitute myself for money, status, recognition, leverage and publishing eyeballs not vaginas and erect phallus symbols. The average reader here in Amnesia has an 8th grade education. Reading paper is declining. Newspapers are history. Weep. They line birdcages and wrap fish. Read the fine print, go digital. The average human worldview is limited to electronic mass media entertainment bullshit. Make me laugh. Ha, ha, ha. I am a cynical realist with the attention span of an infant. Many are too poor to pay attention. Their lives are, is, was, were a constant struggle for food and clean water.

One billion humans do not have access to clean water. Billions are illiterate. 17,000 children die of starvation every single day. Write about that unpleasant fact, dear Ice Girl.

 Literate types want something to read while sitting stranded in a foreign airport when an Icelandic Norse goddess volcano explodes creating a huge swirling cloud of ash complicating their horribly mundane and superficial lives with anxiety. Pass me some Xanax please. Stupid humans feel anxiety as a subterranean level of FEAR. Intelligent people grow doubts. Stupid people grow confidence.

Travel isn’t fun. It’s an adventure.

Many humans love living in the past filled with regret. It’s very comfortable. Why me? They absorb static or moving pictures to escape their terminally bored condition. They feel the need to experience virtual reality on cell phones devolving into soft machine material. Dying is a grim comic business. It’s messy. It’s more expensive than anger.

  I see, said Ice Girl. I’ll ask an animist gravedigger about plot development. Humans suffer from monkey mind. They regret genocides and fear their hopeless future. Not me! Why me? The ego monkey mind loves the CIRCUS, the daily entertainment. It wears them down making them lethargic, depressed, suicidal, and lazy.

  Lazy people never kill themselves.

  They die of boredom. Checkmate, said Death.

  Fate and Death conversed.

  I’m a funny thing, said Fate.

  Yes you are, said Death.

Ice Girl: Here’s how it works. Mindful people respect the monkey mind. They are present and grounded in the long now. They are patient, understanding, tolerant and kind. They are mindful. Others don’t read because they don’t know how or are lazy to learn anything true about themselves, the human condition or paradigm shifts in an amazing world. Mindfulness perceives their meager microscopic self is nothing more than pure energy. Who’s dragging around this bag of bones? Atoms. We are pure light. It’s all about energy, frequency and vibration. Others are not cosmologically or ontologically or evolutionarily engaged in how the world works on a sub-atomic level.

  Lit agent: Sure. They want fast food and a remote to operate their 46-inch plaza screen with 500 channels. They want to read simple stories with simple characters, a hero and a quest. They want happy endings like orgasms. KISS. Experiment with dirty realism. Just give me the surface. Be a witness. Throw in some absurd human activities. Don’t write about what you know.

Write about what you don’t know you need to know. Write to find out.

Write to discover a new universe, a new skin, a new lover, an old idea with shiny tin foiled packaging, like a love sock named OK#1 condom. Write about a decisive moment, like the guy who steps around a puddle on his way to Burmese gallows.

The Savage Detectives is about poets searching for a lost Chilean poet in Europe, another piece of work to consider. Don’t take it too seriously. Everyone dies in the end, one more microscopic essential unpleasant fact about publishing. My tedious job is to accept or reject manuscripts. In the food chain I market it to a publisher. Publishers have editors who read the work. Editors leave or die laughing. New editors read the work. Maybe the first editor worked with us. Maybe a new editor thinks it’s garbage needing a major rewrite, revisions, tax deductions and electromagnetic fluctuations. If so, a narrative HOOK leaves the author in the brothel-publishing graveyard, got it?

  Yes, said Ice Girl. Does that mean or imply you’re really a publishing prostitute with no ethics, morals or higher principles?

  It’s all about money honey, said agent XYZ and eyeballs. Everything has a price, a user and exchange value with utility infielders shagging hot grounders up the middle in the world market game of ideas, weapons, drugs, sex and OK love socks. Don’t give me any philosophical arguments.

  You’ve been very helpful, said Ice Girl. Now let an omniscient illiterate invisible scripter tale the show.

  It’s all yours. I have one question, said lick clit lit agent. How long have you been here?

  All fucking day, said Ice Girl, breaking the ice. Here’s your ticket to the greatest freak show on Earth. You have a front row seat.

 You are a fluke of the universe, said Leo. Take advantage of it. Thanks, said Ice girl. Just doing my work.

 Ice Girl in Banlung

 

Ambiguity - Ice Girl

Chapter 23.

Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

 Voices blended billowing black diesel dust with forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

  Two barefoot mendicants walked past Ice Girl. One looked content. He wore simple tattered white cotton cloth. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. 

  He carried their possessions in three white rice bags on a bamboo pole balanced on a shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed their trail of tears.

  Man #1: These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. He dropped the bags and pole on red dirt. Crash!

  Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love blinked. An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother waiting for medicine holding her child shifted her hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of script. Ice girl massaged cold reality with an edge.

  The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. 

  His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting the pole and bags onto his shoulder.

  Man #2: Where are we going?

  Man #1: Muttering to his feet in red dust, Down this road.

  The Wild West red dust town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

  They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

 Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wore Blue Zircon, seeing harlequins.

 A boy near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see while standing in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding his rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

  He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.

  His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders. He carried melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him Real notes. Thank you for the cold.

  Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

  The woman assaulted ice with a hammer, shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. 

  An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist.”

  History, war, violence and predatory politicians have screwed Cambodians, said Ice Girl.

  Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and increasing) of Cambodia has been sold to foreign investors. 1.7 million out of 11m were massacred. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.

  Any day above ground is a joyful day in paradise, she said. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. But they live in fear. They are afraid the past will become the present. Time is a scary circle.

Annual red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of the genocide regime blasted black sky. A child sang, “The wicked witch is dead!”

  Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four old dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $100,000,000 dollar international show trial for genocide between 1975-1979.

  They deny their role.

  Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.

  That’s what they all say.

  No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah yeah.

  Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories.

Media buys people, said Ice Girl. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.

  Numbed silence covered rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns. Send in the politicians and bankers and thieves and Chinese manipulators.

  Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.

  Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody.

  Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive, said Ice Girl. They started over after Year Zero. 14 million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.

Culture means you can forget. 

It will take another generation, or sixty years given the average life expectancy, to recover revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.

  Down the road, Alice in Slumberland, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You should just blend in. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.

They vanished. They became extinct.

Asking quest-ions was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, incentive and robotic daily comatose poverty existence. 

  Accountability is a foreign language.

  Economic terrorism is an unpleasant fact. Personal incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho, ho.

  An a priori communication theory without facts or truth or  thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity or hard quest-ions is a male land mine survivor without legs living on Ground Zero. He rests near a pagoda waiting for compassion from strangers. A bookseller of genocide memories smokes a cigarette w/o hands.

  Where are the female land mine survivors? Leo asked. Maybe they are dead and gone, said Ice Girl. Maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their daily needs. Removed from Fibonacci’s spiral and the golden mean.

  Ready for a trick quest-ion, she asked. Sure. What’s louder than a group of Khmer people? I don’t know. Another group of Khmer people.

  Get used to it, she said. Volume. Signal-Noise. They love distractions. They live, eat and breathe distractions and signal-noise. They love talking over each other. The one who talks the loudest without saying anything is the winner.

  Most are too poor to pay attention.

  Listening is hard work, said Leo.

  Silence kills people, she said. Fear of death is one long conversation. They’ve been traumatized by their past into the immediate present facing unknown scary futures. It’s a time machine, a time warp and a shift in consciousness.

  For example, said Leo it’s curious seeing the FIRE inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack at 0615 along a muddy road in Battenbang. Orange and bright red flames heat water, consume kindling.

  Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat. Kindling stands stacked like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places waiting to exonerate memories of loss and abandonment.

  It’s a male thing. They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. The men wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, big plans, construction projects, myths and ghosts. They eat fried bread drinking brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass. 

  1.7 million ghosts dance through their silent conversations. Ghosts whisper, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone.

  Feed me, feed me, cried an Asian ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about it. Silence is golden. Men prefer to talk about the long now. Ghosts live in the past. Living in the past is time consuming. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty said another. They have no memory of the past.

Education is the key, said another. We missed our chance. The only chance I had, said one, was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I spend my days in an office rewriting our sanitized history. History is time, said another. Geography is space.

  My dream is to be a gardener, said one. He watches Leo mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

  He works at Bliss, a meditation retreat.

  I love gardening, he said in Khmer. We have nature as our common teacher. Yes, said Leo, Your work here is beautiful.

  He’s a 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contain all the secrets of his survival.

  How did you survive, asked Leo. I ran away, I hid in the jungle, then into the mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature.

  I was running from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, murdering everyone, kids like you, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated, dead.

  Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.   

  When I thought it was safe I emerged, crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I walked over 1.7 million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattled freedom and food. I never sleep. Death sees me. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

  It will take another generation before the Khmer adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Leo. Life is found in a desperate situation, the man said.

  They meet every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. He waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. He smiles as water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

  He sits curled up on a straight-backed brown chair smiling and silent watching Leo typing notes from a black book. I don’t know this tool, he said pointing to a plastic screen and floating artificial letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

  The gardener and Leo heard a voice from a local classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, screamed overworked, underpaid and undersexed Asian teachers named Authority and Social Control.

  Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity. 

  Curiosity is fatal, said Ice Girl. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor and curiosity are basic elements of intelligence.

  Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative at Bliss.

  We colonized this place, said one, Giving them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination, fake NGO bureaucracies, administration tools, wide boulevards, imaginary legal systems, an eye for an eye, corruption possibilities and designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics and principles, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow.

  She is a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover has flabby upper arms. She scribbles her serious fiction-memory and sense of entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examine a microscopic map of Angkor Wat
filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,
gold lame Apsara dancers,
232 species of black and red butterflies,
1.9 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,
crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks,
begging illiterate children speaking 10 European languages
hawking gimcracks
whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education
accompanied by miles of flaming plastic bag garbage,
narrow boned white oxen,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment,
cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense,
1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu Khmer temples stretching from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam in a boomerang circular dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes

as the French ladies whisper,
Where did we go,
What did we see,
How did we feel,
Where are we,

Did we discover the magic eye of sudden insight or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

 They’re on their grand Asian tour. One describes fragments of her short life with an animist talking stick.

  She cuts out brochure pictures and ticket stubs. She pastes them into her book. It will make a fine future visual memory of her ear and snow.

  Her attention span is shorter than a grisly tour for eternity at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 skulls.

Here we are.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Life in Hanoi - Ice Girl

Chapter 14.

Leo’s neighbors are Sam and Dave. Sam’s the kid. Dave is daddy. These are not Viet names. If they were they’d be named Binh and Thin and New Yen, like new Yin or old Yang. 

Dave had a kid so he and his wife can yell at them. So they will have someone, anyone to take care of him or her in old age. When they are sleeping on bamboo recliners absorbing 10,000 kitchen smells. 

It was an arranged marriage after a three-year courtship. Her parents demanded $5,000. Cash or no deal.

You play the game or the game plays you.

They pretended to need kids to support them in old age. When you’re young and naive pregnancy is always an option. It’s easy to have kids in the 13th most populated country on Earth. There are 85 million hard and fast rules of parenthood according to the wildly popular and heavily censored Socialist Party book, Produce & Consume.

Get married early. The pressure is on. 

You do not want to be unmarried, single, sad, lonely, and forgotten like a bad dream. Loneliness increases the chance of heart attacks, strokes of genius, and arterial vestiges of debilitating forms of social upheaval and personal instability in a well-mannered society. 

Extreme pressure is on girls to find a husband. Girls in Sapa illustrate exchange and user values for rural girls to get married at the ripe old age of 16 and begin producing genetic copies. Petri dish. Wash and tear.

It takes hard courage to raise kids with integrity, respect, authenticity and a low level of pain tolerance.

Sam cries. Dave releases streams of anger, bitterness and frustration allowing him to relax, expend, and expand the sound. Dave is startled to hear the sound of his own particular voice ricochet of substandard cold molten gray Hanoi cement block walls. His life is a cold cement wall. Echoes dance through his brain like little sugarplum fairies.

He knows the echo because he made it. He mixed the fine sand and quick dry cement. He slathered it over broken red bricks in circles with an abstract desire to make a work of art lasting forever which is how he thought of it the day he trow welled the paste.

Life gave him art and he used art to criticize life.

His voice, this manifestation expressing human vocal tendencies in a tight enclosed space near the gigantic liquid plasma television permanently implanted on a blank wall blaring news propaganda and perpetual adolescent reality soap shows about life next door where the family sits on cold red floral tile hunching over chipped slurping from cracked rose bowls shoveling steaming rice and green stringy vegetables into lost mouths yelling over each other in tonal decibels competing with a gigantic plasma television featuring dancing bears and pioneer patriots devouring rubber plantations, beaches for golf courses and farmland with a double bladed axe singing, in a high Greek-like chorus, their national anthem about land, sea, air, water as pianos being played by a young Japanese wisp, her fingers a delicate blur of incredibly fast incantation channels dance near a woman garbage collector who rings a bell every day at 16:55 alerting people in Dave’s neighborhood it is time for them to bring out their daily garbage. Remove the evidence. Bag it and tag it. Autopsy material.

Mrs. Pho hears the bell. She’s ready. She’s willing. She’s able. She’s carefully arranged her family’s daily consumption waste into two plastic bags. One pink. One white. Orange and yellow fruit rinds went white, everything else pink. Like shreds of fat. She didn’t waste a thing. No one does. 

Life is a nasty, brutal short struggle she reflected bowing in front of her parent’s images, dead and gone remembered forever with their stoic black and white ghost faces above eternal glowing neon flickering pulsating red, green, blue and white electric Buddha bulbs on the family altar. Plastic flowers, fruit offerings, burning incense - spirit food. Pho hears her father whisper in her burning ear carrying her away from their flaming village. ‘Remember where you came from.’

She never physically returned. She carried memories.

It didn’t really matter which went where because after she’d taken it down the high walled alley blocking all but the most sincere light of fading day, she casually tossed plastic bags into a rusty gray rolling cart with plywood boards reinforcing the height because the massive accumulation of garbage was tremendous. Growing day by day it became part of the collective mess, a collective consciousness. Garbage in-garbage out was everyone’s mantra.

She was content knowing her contribution was not extensive. Just enough. Just enough to get her away from walls where she’d gossip with her neighbors as white twilight cracks filtered past musical hammers, creaking wheelbarrows pulled by skinny boys, incessant motorcycle horns echoing through tight chambers with floating dust particles breaking light into a magical sense of mystery for her tired eyes marveling at this visual epiphany as exactly 21 emaciated shovels of earth were moved and manipulated this way and that by young desperate hungry boys and girls with limited educational opportunities from poor villages very far away laboring wheelbarrows filled with sand, gravel, bricks, mud, sludge, wood, dreams, their bodies caving in from exhaustion, heat, H1N1 virus, mortar attacks, suicide dreamers, drifting among H’mong Sapa kids speaking excellent English with no further hope of an education after 8 dystopian educational years now selling their handicrafts to tourists; bright beaded bags, embroidery stitches, indigo blue staining their hands through long dark cold endless mountain winters as storms howled, ‘Have mercy, Have mercy’ on war weary logic infested objectivists, the towering inferno of their external nightmare reduced to self-pity, leaving

No Exit. A shattered mirror reflected her face.

Inside his cement cell Dave’s angry voice danced with stranded rusty brown barb wire encircling his social network domain name, easing over shards of fractured green glass embedded in shrapnel’s perimeter. The Chinese introduced barbwire when they occupied the neighborhood for 1,000 years. Vietnam forced them all the way back to Manchuria.

The French ate pastries, introduced excellent wines, produced intricate glass mosaics for Dalat spring garden walls to prevent strangers and invaders from getting in, getting on, getting the better of them, as shards of glittering glass composed minuscule myopic musical and colonial architectural ideology. Yellow buildings aged gracefully along Rue this and Rue the day. Vietnam slaughtered the Frogs. They kept the language and baguettes.

Then the Yankees with their megaton Catholic missals of mass destruction and chaos unleashed their fury on the poor unsuspecting suffering masses gathered in Chu Chi’s tunnels below the surface of appearances.

Dave knew this because his grandfather’s father and his father’s family remembered dynasties encroaching on walls, shrines and brown temples welcoming silence.

During the day they worked paddies before evolving underground when nightingales brought carpet-bombing, napalm, Agent Orange. 

“Quick into the tunnels!” They sat sweltering, crying, still. Listening to the dull roaring threaded whoosh as steel and iron canisters thudded, this tremor, shredding forests, fields, homes danced into flames. Heat soared over their tunnels bathing them in sweat. They burrowed deeper. Deeper, following hollow carved earth trails. The earth swallowed their breath. Their bones fertilized soil. Ancestor bones cried in their sleep.

The sweet silence after all the crying and wounded foreign d(evils) fled in terror as peasants streamed down mountains, out of caves and tunnels, poling rivers, attempting to escape, walking on water, drinking oceans of creation myths, draining lands of blood, forcing d-evils into shining seas. A blue green sea danced red.

Their city voices flowed between crumbling sand and crushed red bricks laid haphazard. Cement walls blocked everything but sounds of their anger, frustration and repressed bitterness at life’s twisted fateful reality.

Their memory was a fiction.

This fiction created their memory. 

Ice Girl in Banlung