Pedal Red Road by Rita
Share Article Rita pedals her New Star bike into Siem Reap for ice java. Cold and delicious.
Men playing chess slap wooden pieces, gesticulate & yell at high decibels.
On the idiot box in a tea house Thai kick boxers pummel each other with knees and gloves and violent fury to the endless delight of millions suffering displaced latent aggression.
WHAMO. KILL HIM. KILL HIM. YES.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2 p.m. features local boys and men screaming at a TV, Kill Him. Kill Him. Kill Him.
Idle men playing cards sit with their backs to a river in the shade of empty white tourist vans waiting for bodies brushing dust. Looking busy is fun.
She pedals across a bridge over a wide brown river bisecting the town. She goes to a car wash business with a small restaurant. The woman owner is pleasant and happy with high cheekbones. Pregnant with her second child. She employs four kitchen kids and six for the car wash. Her husband is a driver. He sleeps in a green hammock. She plays cards with the workers.
The car wash business has two raised cement bays for cars. Today it is empty.
Rita eats a simple meal of wide egg noodles, carrots, bamboo shoots, pork and eggs.
A car wash boy wears a green sarong towel. He lays his one white shirt on a rusty brown cement platform. He scrubs his shirt with a bar of soap, turns on the high-pressure hose blasting flying soap from the shirt. He rinses it.
He walks over to a metal rack shakes out his best shirt and hangs it up. He adjusts the collar and fixes the top button. He slaps water out of a yellow t-shirt, a small towel, another dark shirt and hangs them.
He owns two pairs of long dark pants. He turns them inside out on hangers to dry in tropical heat. He disappears behind a green plastic screen for a nap. No cars today. Dreaming in dust he hears hysterical males across the river of time yelling, Kill Him. Kill Him. Kill Him.
Culture is what you are. Nature is what you can be.
Down south two French women arrive at the Blissful Guesthouse in Kampot. Kampot is famous for pepper and old decrepit French colonial buildings filled with literary hooks along a river flowing to the sea and packs of vicious starving canines.
It took Iraqi gunmen three months to kill 58,000 stray dogs in Baghdad after the war.
A traveler writing in a bougainvillea garden said to the women, Welcome to Paradise.
Is this paradise, said one woman.
Paradise is wherever you are, said traveler.
One woman with a cloud of white hair smiled, You give us a great power.
You already have the power, said traveler. You are a light warrior.
We can talk about that later.
I am a now not a later.
They went to reception. There were no rooms. They wheeled their bags through sands of time. They discussed life’s vagaries in fluent French while laughing at the absurdity of it all with existential wisdom.
