“Mind yourself,” Z said in cursive Latin as she and Lucky exploring diverse civilizations cradled a bamboo candle on their quest for an illuminated translation.
One morning while walking to the Bursa Metro he received a rose from a kind Kurdish woman who tended a small grocery below a quadrant of grey cookie-cutter Soviet apartment blocks filled with crying children and sad adults devoured emotional immaturity content in a guilt-based context between a physical object and a precise concept.
“We are good at doing two things,” sang a Turkish man swirling a silver spoon in his tea...'around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows, tinkle, tinkle little star how I wonder where you are, way down in the glass so low with processed sugar’...sitting and singing, here we go.”
“I thought you said reading and writing,” said Rita, the anarchist writer of Ice Girl in Banlung and H20 seller in Ratanakiri. To make ends meet on weekends her family of eleven rented her out to a NGO scam at an artificial orphanage.
Buy her beware.
Rita knew what was what.
“According to UNICEF, there has been a 65% rise in the number of orphanages since 2005. There are more than 300 and yet, only 21 of those are run by the state.”
“Say more,” said Lucky.
“UNICEF estimates that 72% of the 12,000 children in Cambodian orphanages have at least one living parent or close relative. Desperate poverty makes it easy to persuade uneducated families that their kids will be better off in an orphanage.”
Her Banlung machine world roared, reversed, revered and resounded with operatic overtones. 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.
Ghosts said we are nothing but historical history. Memory agreed. Voices blended with billowing black diesel exhaust and forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.
Two barefoot mendicants walked past Rita. One content in a simple white cotton cloth shirt and pants. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. He carried their possessions in three white rice bags suspended on a bamboo pole balanced on a bony shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed his trail of tears.
Man #1. These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. Bags and pole crashed on red dirt.
Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust.
A rich man getting out of 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 and an easy ten bucks blinked.
An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep.
A mother begging for fake medicine at a health clinic holding her child shifted hip weight.
A monk in a pagoda turned a page of Sanskrit.
An ice girl massaged cold reality with her sharp edge of truth.
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 bamboo and bags onto his bony shoulder. Where are we going? Muttering to his feet wearing red dust, one said down this endless road.
The Wild West 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 wearing Blue Zircon saw harlequins.
A boy downstream near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see standing tall in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding a 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 carrying melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him monetary notes, Thank you for the cold.
Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.
Rita opened a big orange plastic box. She picked up a chunk of ice in her left hand, cradling it in a blue cloth slamming a hammer on ice. It cracked. Fissures of released refracted pressure, jagged lines and imperfect beautiful white lightning spread deep inside ice. Holding global warming in her left hand she smashed it with all her power and strength fragmenting ice, floe chips and elemental particles.
A sharp piece of frozen ice pierced Lucky’s left eye. The sensation of pain was minimal, immediate and directly cushioned by the delicious cold feeling of ice melting through a retina, cones, rods, a pupil, nerve endings, frontal lobe, cerebral tissue, and layers of perception altering his visual organic sensation as ice light transmitted new electric signals from rerouted optic nerves to the cerebral cortex following a path of synapses.
Enhanced visual acuity reflected everything. The stimulant was all. The world is made of water seeing crystals shimmering in ice mirror kaleidoscopes. Illusions of truth, pleasure, pain and drama danced. Long jagged beautiful sparkling universes emitted glowing crystal rivers. Everything he saw, heard, touched, tasted and felt was ice.
Sibylline language.
She dropped the block of ice into the box. Collecting chips in a glass, she added fresh thick brown coffee, sweet condensed milk extract, a straw and a spoon. She handed it to him. Here, you look tired and thirsty, I am, thanks, I’ve been walking all day. It’s delicious. You’re welcome.
She assaulted ice with a hammer shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. She bagged a block of ice and handed it to a cycle man. He gave her crumbled Real notes.
An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist. It’s a myth.”
History, war, violence and predatory politicians screwed Cambodians, said Rita handing Zeynep, Leo, Lucky cold impermanence.
“Reading and writing is for idiots,” a Turkish man said to his attachment’s delight. “I am proficient at eating and fighting. I’ve been killing people for 4,000 years little thing. Nobody knows who the king is.”
Z said: I am a camera. Close my aperture to f/8 or f/11 for depth of field. I am a snow leopard in hot sun on Himalayan ice. I am a human mirror reflecting mud and meadows of reality. I am Winter Hawk winging free. I am resilient Bamboo.
I am love - a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor. Love is in the air. Run for cover. I am Patience, your great teacher.
I am mindfulness.
I am breath.
I inhale life and exhale death in a random universe.
I am blood red ink drawing in dust and unloading words for a book called TLC to be explored, experimented and abandoned.
Wearing a burgundy pashmina shawl from Lhasa before the Chinese invaded in 1959 with Re-Education propaganda/publicity machines of terror, fear, suffering and death I smell like fresh Anatolian laundry in a gentle spring breeze.
Ice Girl in Banlung
The Language Company
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